


The Descent of Magic

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Disability, F/M, Fantastic Racism, HP: Epilogue Compliant, M/M, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Politics, magical research
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-16
Updated: 2013-01-16
Packaged: 2017-11-25 19:01:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 94,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/642004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry Potter, retired Auror, is also a budding magical theorist who likes a quiet life. When he discovers what seems to be a possible reason that so many pure-blood families are losing their magic and having Squib children, he keeps it quiet, because he knows it would only cause a storm of controversy. But an equally budding acquaintance with Draco Malfoy might change his mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dust and Laughter

**Author's Note:**

> The title of the fic and a few details of Harry's life are taken from the story of Darwin, who was also reluctant to publicize the details of his evolutionary theory, knowing the controversy that would result. Both Harry and Draco are older in this story and have had their epilogue marriages, but are currently divorced. Harry is disabled, with damage to his knee, after torture at the hands of his enemies.
> 
> Additional warnings: Brief flashbacks to torture, issues of disability, rather nasty and canon Draco at first, some angst.

  
Harry blew dust off the books and shook his head. Kreacher had taken care of everything else in Grimmauld Place for so long. Why in the world had he missed this particular library?  
  
Then he remembered exactly where he'd found the books--shut up behind a false panel in the attic, apparently for not being Dark enough--and grinned. _Hard for Kreacher to dust them if he doesn't know about them._  
  
Harry picked up an armful, weighed them for a moment, and decided they were light enough that his knee wouldn't automatically give out beneath him if he crossed the floor holding them. He limped back to his working chair and spread the books out on the table, studying them in the shaft of sunlight that fell through the window. Kreacher kept trying to light the fire in the small drawing room, and Harry kept putting it out. On a summer day like this, it wasn't necessary. He could wrap his knee in Warming Charms if he had to.  
  
The book on the top was called _The Descent of the Pure-Blood Lines,_ the one beneath that _Living with Centaurs,_ and so on down the line. Harry shook his head again as he opened the first one and discovered a small date written inside the front cover: 1862. He didn't know how useful this particular one would be, given his new theoretical project.  
  
 _Of course, all you have to do is tell Hermione you're interested in theory, and she'll be here in an instant with all the modern books you want._  
  
Harry sighed. He'd leaned on Hermione too much over the years. He wanted to do something, find something new, for himself. Of course, God knew that he would probably stumble along for a while making "discoveries" that had been known for decades and crying out excitedly at things proven wrong. But it was still good practice for him to try.  
  
He flipped a few pages further on and began to read.  
  
*  
  
"Master must eat!"  
  
Harry emerged, blinking, from the book. He'd never known sentences seven hundred words long with sixty verbs, the way that most of the older authors seemed to write, could be so interesting. He looked down at Kreacher, who stood glaring up at him and tapping his foot, and then glanced back at the book.  
  
"I need to?" he asked. His voice had a hollow echo, like someone talking from the midst of long, vaulted corridors.  
  
"Master _needs_ to," Kreacher said, and thrust the sort of plate at him that Harry might have managed to devour when he was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy at Hogwarts. Now, at forty-five, Harry poked uncertainly at a sandwich that looked as though it had been made by emptying fat onto the bread and picked up a fork to cut a tomato.   
  
"Master must eat!" Kreacher pulled hard at his ears, a motion that Harry knew was out of exasperation, since he'd forbidden Kreacher to punish himself. "Master wishes to starve to death," he announced to the air. "Starve to death and leave Kreacher all alone." He bent down and glared at Harry's robes, as though he could see Harry's ribs through them. Harry rolled his eyes. Since retiring from the Aurors, he'd actually developed a slight paunch.  
  
"I don't want to starve to death," Harry said. "Even if I did, I'd smell something of yours cooking and it would make me change my mind."  
  
The joke fell flat, as most of the jokes he tried on Kreacher did. Kreacher gave him another unnecessarily dramatic glare, threw his hands up, and announced to the world around him, "Master is pleased to jest. Master is jesting. Faithful Kreacher is cooking, and Master is jesting."  
  
Harry sighed. "Please go away, Kreacher. Go--" He had an inspiration. "Go make something chocolate." He did still like eating sweet things no matter how occupied he was, which was part of the reason for his slight paunch, and Kreacher took forever with the desserts partially because of that.  
  
Kreacher beamed at once and hugged Harry's foot. "Master is not wishing to starve to death!" he shouted.  
  
"Yes, yes," Harry said, and kicked a little to dislodge him. "Go away now."  
  
Kreacher vanished, still smiling in ecstasy--which was a disturbing thing to contemplate on any house-elf's face--and Harry started eating the tomato, carefully holding it out of the way so it wouldn't drip on the book. Eating and reading together worked better than he'd expected, and by the time that Kreacher came back with a chocolate mousse held carefully aloft, Harry had learned more than he’d thought he’d absorb in such a short time.  
  
Not that most of it wasn't nonsense, really, as any book about pure-bloods being _really_ different from Muggleborns was bound to be. But Harry's biggest problem since his retirement was entertaining himself, and this was interesting.  
  
*  
  
"Harry?" The low voice came from his right side, and Harry rolled towards it, snorting an automatic question.  
  
"Harry!"  
  
That was when he remembered that he wasn't married to Ginny anymore and couldn't conduct conversations in sleepy grunts with her. Harry blinked and sat up, making sure that his covers were pulled up to his waist. Sleeping half-naked didn't bother him, but he still felt a little self-conscious in his pants in front of his ex-wife, for many of the same reasons that he would feel awkward about doing it in front of Hermione.  
  
Ginny lifted an eyebrow. "It's nothing I haven't seen before, you know," she pointed out.  
  
"I know." Harry yawned, and didn't bother to shield the yawn. Ginny rolled her eyes. She was much more polite than he was, which Harry attributed to having a mum who cared and Ginny attributed to being female.  
  
"Fine," Ginny said. "Al wants to know if he can visit you this weekend."  
  
Harry blinked. He would have expected an eighteen-year-old to please himself. "Of course. Why is he asking permission?"  
  
"Because he wants to bring Scorpius Malfoy with him." Ginny's voice was dryer than some of the old tapestries upstairs.  
  
The tapestries that Scorpius had competently set on fire the last time he was here, Harry remembered. Never mind the banister he had splintered trying to slide down it, the first-floor window he had broken jumping out of it, and the bedclothes torn into strips to make bonds for when he and Al played Wicked Death Eater. Scorpius seemed to have decided that, as the first Malfoy ever to be Sorted into Gryffindor, he might as well go out and do idiotic, daredevil things with as much enthusiasm as his father had schemed and plotted.  
  
 _That's a bit unfair,_ Harry reminded himself, and focused on Ginny again. "Yes, that's all right. But I'll be casting Preservation Charms on everything in the house before they come, so could they tell me the hour? And stick to it?" he added, remembering the one memorable time that Al had asked if Scorpius could come for "Christmas holidays" and then both of them had ended up at Harry's house three days before the term ended, with all of Hogwarts in an uproar searching for them.  
  
"Done," said Ginny, with a bit of grim relish. "I'll get Mum to talk to them."  
  
Harry grinned. Molly Weasley could be an unholy terror when she wished to be--  
  
Including the day when she had found out that Harry and Ginny were divorcing.  
  
Harry winced, remembering that time, and he saw Ginny's grin vanish as she remembered, too, or at least saw that she'd reminded him of it. She gave him an awkward smile a few seconds later. If they'd been in the same room, he thought she would have reached out and patted his hand. They made much better friends after their divorce than Harry would ever have thought they could.  
  
"Yes, she'll talk to them," Ginny said. "And I'll make sure that Al understands you're too old to go chasing them around the gardens or demonstrate dueling techniques the way they'd probably like you to."  
  
"I'm not," Harry protested, but Ginny had already vanished in a puff of green fire. Harry rolled his eyes and leaned back with a little grunt. She always had to get in the last word.  
  
He glanced at the clock that sat beside his bed, made as a replica of the Weasley watch--which had died during the heroic duty of shielding his heart from a curse that might have stopped it--and cheered up when he realized it was only Thursday. He had another day or so before Al and Scorpius invaded (always assuming their definition of "weekend" was firmer than their definition of "Christmas holiday.") He could get up and do some reading in the meantime.  
  
*  
  
"Hi, Dad!"  
  
Harry smiled and looked up at Al as he came through the front door, dragging behind him the two trunks that every young Slytherin seemed required by law to travel with. Behind him came Scorpius, smiling as he shook the rain out of his long blond hair. Harry's lips twitched when he realized that it was in a braid woven with bright streaks of red, although he wasn't sure if the red came from a spell, dye, or just ribbons. If Scorpius's father had seen that, he was probably still trying to recover.  
  
"Hello, Al," he said, and turned his chair towards his son instead of trying to stand. The knee was misbehaving today; even light walking made him feel as if the joint had turned to water. Al gave him an exuberant hug, but didn't knock him down with his back-pounding the way he would have tried if Harry was standing. Harry smiled into his neck. So his children _could_ learn.   
  
_At least, they can after an immediate scolding by their grandmother._  
  
"Mr. Potter," Scorpius said, undoing one of the ties that bound his braid and revealing that the red did come from dye. Harry's lips twitched again. "Hi! How are you?"  
  
"Not looking forward to more broken windows and torn carpets," Harry said.  
  
Scorpius lifted his head with immense dignity that Harry actually could see him learning from his father. "I wasn't the one who tore up the carpet last time," he said. "That was Jamie."  
  
Harry opened his mouth to remind the young berk that his elder son hadn't been with them the last time they visited Grimmauld Place--James was in Romania with his uncle Charlie, and had been since early last year--but then rolled his eyes as he remembered. Scorpius had named his large, mutant, incredibly dumb and friendly Crup after "the best role model a dog could have," a tribute that James had not at all appreciated. Scorpius claimed that the Crup had been crossed over with a poodle and was therefore supposed to be smart. From what Harry could see, the poodle had given Jamie shaggy curls that were forever straggling into his eyes and nothing else in the way of features, unless inverted intelligence was a feature.  
  
Scorpius also claimed that Jamie was lying low so that he could astonish everyone with his intelligence someday. Harry thought it would have to be a bloody astonishing show after this long.  
  
"You didn't bring him with you, did you?" Harry added, looking beyond Scorpius. There was no mutant Crup in sight, but that meant less than nothing with some of the pranks that Scorpius and Al had pulled in the past.  
  
"I convinced him that it was for the best to leave Jamie at home, Dad," Al said smoothly, before Scorpius could say something that would hint darkly at the dog being in one of their boxes or waiting outside the house. "I think it's punishment enough for Mr. Malfoy to have to deal with him." Al smirked and threw his head back so that his own long hair spiraled over his shoulder. "He deserves it."  
  
"Oh? What did your father do now?" Harry looked with some interest at Scorpius, who was rolling his eyes at the back of Al's head and looked a bit abashed at being caught out.   
  
"Uh." Scorpius scratched the back of his neck. "He--accidentally sacked one of the house-elves," he admitted at last, as if that was something shameful. Or else his father had told him about Harry's history with the Malfoy house-elves and Scorpius had developed an unusual sense of delicacy in the last year, Harry thought. "He's been sulking about it for the past month."  
  
"No different than Hogwarts, then," Harry said before he could stop himself. He felt his face flush a moment later. Ginny would scold him in a low voice and ask _when_ he would grow up.  
  
But Scorpius gave him a glance that flashed like lightning and flung himself down on the couch across from Harry. "Tell me more stories about what my dad was like during Hogwarts, Mr. Potter," he said, half-command and half-plea. "They're some of the funniest things I've ever heard."  
  
" _Scorp_ ," Al said, in the tone of someone who had been afflicted with his father's Hogwarts stories more than he liked, although in reality, Harry hardly ever told them. He tugged on his friend's arm. "We have to go figure out how Uncle George made that Everlasting Song prank work, or he's going to get ahead of us."  
  
Harry hid a smile. Al and Scorpius had developed the ambition to open their own joke shop to compete with Weasley's Wizard Wheezes. Al didn't seem to care that most of the people in the family would look on the ambition as disloyal. He'd started it, and what he started, he carried through.  
  
Scorpius sighed noisily, rolled his eyes at Harry in a way that Harry was used to seeing from Ginny where Lily was concerned, and then stood up and said, "Coming, Al." He turned back on the way out of the room and mouthed to Harry, _Later, okay?_  
  
Harry nodded back, amused. As far as he knew, Scorpius, a cheerful, bouncy, generous kid, carried out his rebellion against his father by being as Gryffindor as possible. But Harry could hardly blame him, not when Al had described the Howler Scorpius had received the day after their Sorting for being put into Gryffindor. Scorpius had crushed the ashes of the letter in his hand, his face pale. Then, the way Al told the story, Scorpius's face lit up. He'd come up with an immensely pleasing plan: if his father despised him for who he was, he would be that person to the absolute limits. Five minutes later, Scorpius had started a food fight that left Neville wearing cereal about his ears and had established his reputation as a troublemaker. Draco got far more letters about his son than he ever bothered to send.  
  
 _He deserves it, right bigot that he is._  
  
Harry turned back to the reading that Al and Scorpius had interrupted when they came into the room. It was a list of pure-blood families from the last several centuries, tracking the intermarriages and the numbers of children they had, including Squib children. Its author had been hounded out of the wizarding world when he published it, but Harry was finding it an invaluable resource so far.  
  
And it had confirmed that some of his first impressions, and the public's first impressions, were wrong. Not all the pure-blood families were having fewer numbers of children, or fewer numbers of magical children. The Weasleys reproduced all over the place, of course, and so did the Prewetts, and so did the Bones family. They were the exception rather than the rule, but they were there. If there was some kind of magical infertility plague afflicting the pure-bloods, the way that people like Rita Skeeter kept insisting, then it had mysteriously missed out on some of the most fertile victims. And it couldn't be due to the admixture of Muggleborn blood, either, as Malfoy kept arguing in some of his published articles, since those families were among the ones most welcoming to Muggleborns.  
  
Harry shook his head. It was a mystery, and he hardly expected to find the answer all by himself. But it was something to dig into, and he knew well enough that his greatest danger in living alone was boredom. He dipped back into the book.


	2. Study Makes the Difference

  
"Oh, wow, Uncle Harry!"  
  
Harry smiled at Lucy as she clambered up one of the ladders he'd had Kreacher install in the library, after promising faithfully that he would never use them himself. Lucy was Percy's daughter, but she took his studiousness and his rule-following and made it an interest, not an obsession. Her eyes sparkled now as she turned around on the ladder, balancing a book in front of her that seemed to just about counterweight the long red hair dangling over one shoulder.   
  
"I never knew you _had_ all these!" Before he could tell her not to, Lucy jumped from the rung she was on to the floor, landing with a flexibility that made Harry wince. She held out the book in front of her and admired it. "A complete copy of Moongrass's _Rules of Potions-Making for the Beginner!_ This teaches all sorts of stuff they think is NEWT level now..."  
  
Kreacher appeared in the middle of the room, looking around frantically. Harry held out a hand to calm him down. It had only taken one of his falls for Kreacher to respond that way to any loud thump.   
  
"Oh," Lucy said, when she saw him. She put her hand over her mouth and looked at Harry with wide, dismayed eyes, more like her Aunt Hermione than her father. Harry tried to picture Percy feeling the same kind of dismay and ended up snorting.  
  
"It's all right," he told Kreacher. "She jumped off the ladder, that's all."  
  
That caused Kreacher to go into a furious flurry of scolding about the ways that "young mistresses' heads could break open and their brains could spill around the library," which Lucy listened to with a meekness that wasn't like her. Harry snorted again, into his hand. If this little incident made Lucy listen a bit better, that was all to the good. Harry enjoyed his nieces and nephews as well as his own children, but he didn't appreciate their ambition to die in new and interesting ways.  
  
 _Did I seem that reckless to the professors, when I was young?_  
  
Harry grimaced. He owed an apology to the shades of Professor Snape and Professor Dumbledore if that was true--well, maybe only the former, since he doubted that Dumbledore had had any qualms about Harry's ability to take care of himself.  
  
But Lucy had inspired him, and he returned to the library later that afternoon to check out the volumes on the higher shelves. After one try at the ladder that made both it and his knee sway alarmingly, he let Kreacher fetch the books down to him, while he examined them with some attention.  
  
There was one that looked interesting, and he retired to his bed with it. _Legends of Perpetuation Among the Pure-Bloods,_ it was called, and written by an author whose name was so smudged Harry couldn't make it out, but it was about legends concerning marriage, childbirth, children, and inbreeding in general.  
  
Harry had to snicker over a comment he found in the book's preface. _It is now generally agreed that the most inbred pure-blood family is the Malfoys, who have married their cousins for sixteen generations._ It was probably a good thing for Scorpius that his father and, as far as Harry knew, his grandfather had been only children.   
  
For a few seconds, he tried to imagine the sort of woman Scorpius would marry, and then shook his head. Whoever she was, she'd need a large tolerance for pranks, property damage, and mutant Crup sick on the rugs.  
  
*  
  
Harry sighed and leaned over the Black family tapestry again, tracing the broken lines and the burned-out members with one finger. He could feel the tantalizing hints of answers hovering at the edges of his mind, but whenever he thought he had grasped one, he found at least two pure-blood families, and usually more than that, who were an exception to the rule.  
  
It _shouldn't_ be so difficult to prove that the "Muggleborn plague" the pure-bloods had feared was just a myth, and that they were having fewer magical children for some other reason. But the theories Harry had started with--some kind of magical disease, a certain combination of spells taught at Hogwarts, the presence of one bloodline that had been contaminated with something in almost all pure-blood families, a sterility curse that had not quite worked as advertised--all broke down. The Weasleys were fertile, families that didn't send their children to Hogwarts still produced Squibs, most sterility curses were all or nothing, and there was no magical disease that produced three children in one generation, then two, then four, then one and one and one and one, the way the Malfoys had worked, for example. Harry had also tried looking at the matter by gender, by location, by age of first marriage, and even by magical specialty.  
  
Nothing.  
  
Harry leaned back on the stool that he used when he had to sit for long periods and cursed under his breath. He didn't know why he was so eager to solve this riddle, other than it had become _his_ riddle and that he feared, someday, the pure-bloods would use it to stir up prejudice against Muggleborns the way Voldemort had managed. Going back through old newspaper clippings of the first war against Voldemort had revealed, sure enough, that he sometimes used the rumor that pure-bloods would become infertile unless they stopped associating with Muggleborns.  
  
 _There has to be some way to approach this. You've thought of the obvious things. Turn to the stupid things._  
  
Harry rubbed a hand across his face, half-smiling. All right. He would start with things that couldn't possibly have anything to do with blood purity, like if they had studied at Muggle universities or what color hair they would have.  
  
That might be enough.  
  
*  
  
"Daaaaad."  
  
"Ah, it's the hunting call of the wronged Lily," Harry said dryly, not looking up from the list of names he had made. He had gone it over several times now, and each time, he had shaken his head to clear it. No. His conclusions weren't making _sense._ Or rather, they corresponded to each other, but it still didn't make sense. Why would it be the families generally considered blood traitors who were the most fertile?  
  
"You could be more sympathetic."  
  
Harry grinned up at his daughter as she sulkily hugged the doorway of his reading room. At sixteen years old, Harry thought she could probably break hearts, except when she pouted the way she did now. Then she looked all of six. "I'm sorry, sweetie," he said, and patted the stool beside him. "Who was it this time?"  
  
"Augustus Cornfoot." Lily drooped over to him, kissed his cheek, and moped her way into the seat. "He seemed so _perfect._ He was attentive and the perfect gentleman and he said that he wanted to date me and that he didn't care you were my dad and..." A vague gesture encompassed all the qualities that Cornfoot hadn't turned out to actually have.  
  
"Ah. What happened?" Harry wasn't about to comment on the impact that his being her father had on Lily. For one thing, she'd told him so little about it that he honestly didn't know what he should say. For another, well, he had limited his impact in the only ways that could. His early retirement had probably helped.  
  
"He was dating me and another girl at the same time, is what happened." Lily flattened her hands on her knees and sniffed. "And I hexed him. I got detention for a fortnight, but I couldn't do anything else, could I?"  
  
Harry considered. It was the sort of response her mother would have had, but as far as he knew, Ginny hadn't acted on her temper _every_ time she was wronged. She'd been too shy for her first few years at Hogwarts, among other things. Shyness was a foreign word to Lily. "Are you supposed to be out of school right now?" he asked.  
  
"Um," said Lily, and suddenly found the rungs of her stool fascinating.  
  
"Lils," Harry sighed.  
  
"Don't _call_ me that!" Lily could flash up into fire, like her mother, when she considered that she'd been wronged. "Everyone calls me that just because they think that I can't get back at them, and I _hate_ it!"  
  
That was a usual argument, too. Harry let it pass, and then leaned forwards and looked hard into her face. "If you're found out of school this close to the end of the year, Lily, then you know that they might simply gave you detention until the summer holidays begin."  
  
Lily pouted at him.  
  
Harry shook his head. "What kind of hex was it?"  
  
Lily brightened and leaned in to hug him. "Then you agree that it was justified?" she asked in a pleased voice. "Professor Grimfoot said it wasn't."  
  
Harry sighed again. Professor Grimfoot was the Potions professor at Hogwarts and the Head of Hufflepuff House, into which the Sorting Hat had placed Lily. To this day, Harry still had no idea why. The Hat must have been having an off day. "Of course it was justified," he said. "He shouldn't have cheated on you. But it would also depend on what the hex was. The thought was good, but the casting might not have been."  
  
"It was the Bat-Bogey Hex," Lily said. "He wasn't worth more than that."  
  
Harry nodded. "Then I think you can go back and you won't have detention for the rest of the year." Clumsily, he patted her shoulder. Of all his children, she was the one he felt the most helpless around. After years of work, he thought he understood James, and his relationship with Al was very calm and uncomplicated when Scorpius wasn't there. Al had grown into who he was and what he wanted during school, and needed little help. But Lily was a riotous, rollicking, bounding bag of desires and wants and yearnings that Harry sometimes thought he sympathized with and sometimes found alien. He never knew if his advice was good for her or not.  
  
But he had learned a little more about Professor Grimfoot than he'd known when his children started school, and on this score, he was sure that he was right. "He doesn't _like_ punishing you," he said, and Lily pulled away and stared at him. "No, really," Harry assured her. "I think he regards you as a promising student. The way he treats you when I visit reminds me of the way that Professor McGonagall treated me."   
  
"I think she drank an immortality potion or something," Lily confided. "There's no way that she can be that old and still teach all the time."  
  
Harry shook his head with a faint smile. McGonagall was the only one of her professors that Lily instinctively obeyed, because McGonagall would do things like set her to writing lines when she didn't. "Witches and wizards live longer than Muggles, and Professor Dumbledore was a lot older than she is now. Anyway. Professor Grimfoot isn't trying to make your life miserable. He thinks you could be a brilliant Healer, or Auror, or whatever else you want to excel in Potions for. But he hates the way that you get distracted. He thinks it takes away from your schoolwork."  
  
"Cornfoot, and dating in general, and boyfriends, and vengeance, aren't _distractions_ ," Lily said. Her voice sounded stuffy.  
  
Harry nodded. "I know. But a hex isn't vengeance, either, and you aren't someone who can make reliable judgments about who should suffer. Lily--you're a wonderful person, but you think almost exclusively of the present, and your professors are thinking more of the future. That's why they can give you detention and you can think they're unfair, at the same time."  
  
"And they're right, of course." Lily didn't sound upset, which might mean that he hadn't given her disastrous advice this time.  
  
"No." Harry kissed her forehead, which she didn't complain about, because there were no boys around to see. "I think the truth lies somewhere in between, the way it does with most things."  
  
Lily watched him for a moment, then bounced to her feet. "Thanks, Dad," she said. "I'll remember that." She kissed him on the cheek, then ran into the other room. A moment later, Harry heard the whoosh of the Floo. He made a mental note to figure out how she had made the school fireplaces work to get into his house. Most of the time, Hogwarts had precautions in place to prevent students from doing that.  
  
He stared down at his notes again.  
  
 _I think the truth lies somewhere in between._  
  
All right. Instead of denying his conclusions, then, he should look for some other way that they could be true. It wasn't _really_ the case that rich pure-blood families were infertile and the poorer ones were fertile, because there were some branches of both that produced more or fewer children. But some condition connected to wealth or the lack of it could be the answer.  
  
With new determination, Harry bent over the papers again. His children always inspired him.  
  
*  
  
And that was it. There were no more conclusions to be drawn. Harry leaned back and stared at the papers in front of him, shaking his head.  
  
It sounded right to him. Of course, Hermione's warnings had to be heeded, too. For all Harry knew, dozens of other people had also thought this, and then their theories had been shattered by some basic fact that they'd overlooked.  
  
But it seemed to fit the facts as Harry understood them.  
  
The families who had had the most children in the last three hundred years, and the branches of those families individually who'd also had the most, were the ones without house-elves.  
  
It was there, Harry thought, putting his finger at the top lefthand corner of the parchment, where he'd started drawing some of the family lines, and then tracing down towards the bottom righthand corner. The Weasleys had had small families until the middle of the 1700s, when they'd lost a lot of their money in legal fees and feuds with the Malfoy family. Within two generations, they were having four or five children, not the single heir they'd struggled so hard to have when they were richer, and the women had stopped dying in childbirth quite so often, and Squib children became rarer.  
  
The same thing had happened to the Prewetts, Molly Weasley's birth family. They had no twins until the point where one of their heirs gambled most of his money anyway and had to live frugally for the rest of his life. Then suddenly there were twins everywhere, including Mrs. Weasley's twin brothers, Fabian and Gideon, the ones who had died in the war. Harry reached up to touch the small twist of metal on a chain around his neck, all that remained of the battered watch she’d given him.  
  
The Longbottoms had had a long stretch of single male heirs; then one of those heirs died early, and the house-elves, the formal records said, refused to obey the distant cousin that the house and property legally belonged to, maybe because he wasn't harsh enough. But that cousin had children and to spare, and they had children, and everyone seemed to have been both happy and fertile, having single heirs by choice only, until the point where the old house-elves died and they could acquire new ones. Then both Longbottom women and Longbottom men turned infertile, and the family was quickly down to a single male heir and perhaps one sibling again, a lot of whom had a nasty habit of dying shortly after they'd had their own heirs.  
  
And not always natural deaths, either. Harry thought of Frank Longbottom.  
  
He also thought of the way that Hannah Abbot, who'd married Neville, had miscarried again and again, and how her one daughter was a precious surviving child, overprotected by both her parents. But who could blame them, when Neville, at least, must have some idea of his family's history?  
  
The Blacks seemed to be the exception at first, because they'd had lots of children by pure-blood standards. But they'd married cousins, and not all those cousins had house-elves; only the main branch of the family, the one that had owned Grimmauld Place, could afford them. As those branches were folded back into each other, the number of children diminished, and the madness that plagued the family increased. Bellatrix hadn't had children, though Harry wasn't entirely sure that was attributable to house-elves. Regulus and Sirius--he swallowed roughly--had died early. Andromeda and Narcissa both had one child each, and though Tonks might have had more if she hadn't died early, Draco Malfoy had produced only one, as well.  
  
And Scorpius had told Harry, one night when he'd needed to talk about it or explode, how badly his parents had wanted more children. But no matter how they tried, the furthest any pregnancy got was a stillbirth, which the Healers had told them was the result of the child being so low in magic that it couldn't cope with the power that flowed in Astoria's blood. If that little boy, Scorpius's younger brother, had lived, he would have been pure Muggle.  
  
 _It's like a curse,_ Harry thought. _Not just an association, not just the natural consequences of in-breeding, but a magical consequence.  
  
Of...what?_  
  
That was the part he couldn't figure out. He knew now, from his reading, that some families had had house-elves raise the children, but others hadn't. There was no guarantee that one generation of one particular family would follow the custom of their parents, either. Sometimes a powerful woman set a certain fashion, or the Ministry made a declaration that was more or less followed, or the Healers said one thing or the other was more healthy and people listened. Harry had found a diary written by Walburga Black that suggested they'd had Sirius raised by house-elves but not Regulus. Both of them had still died young and possibly had a touch of the Black madness about them.  
  
It didn't make sense. Having house-elves in the home, even having them around the children, couldn't be it.  
  
So he'd found one part of the answer, but the larger one was still missing. Harry shook his head and stood up, striding towards the library.  
  
Three steps and his knee locked up, the part in the middle that often felt liquid shifting and blending with the frozen joints. Harry folded forwards over it and managed to catch himself in time to keep from falling. Kreacher still appeared in response to his groan of pain, ears oriented on him.  
  
"Master Harry has overstrained himself," he said, in the kind of tone that he would usually keep to accuse someone of stealing the plate.  
  
Harry winced and sat up, doing his best to stretch his leg out in front of him without straining it. That would only prove the truth of Kreacher's words. "It's not as bad as it looks," he panted, closing his eyes and leaning his head against his knee. It _hurt_ , badly enough that he felt as though someone was scraping at it with a pick. But, well, he simply had to ignore that. When he thought he could get his hands under him and push up, he did so.   
  
Kreacher was there before he could move any further, binding him with that silent magic house-elves had and levitating him onto a stretcher. Harry hadn't seen the stretcher appear, but he knew Kreacher must have fetched it from the store of them in one of the unused rooms on the first floor.  
  
"Kreacher, I'm _fine_ ," Harry said, but his voice withered a bit in the face of Kreacher's glare.  
  
"Master Harry is not being fine," Kreacher said. "Master Harry is being stupid, ungrateful, hurt, in needing of care, requiring his friends..."  
  
On and on it went, a long list of descriptive phrases, while Kreacher levitated Harry up to his bedroom. Harry closed his eyes and lay back, concentrating on his breathing. When he didn't, it seemed to come out in time with the throbs in his knee, and that increased the pain.  
  
He _hated_ this. He was grateful to be alive, no matter what Kreacher said, but he wished that those warlocks who'd captured and tortured him hadn't used the kind of spells to slowly tear his knee joint sideways that meant even magic couldn't completely help him recover from the problems.  
  
He could walk, if he was careful. But a simple rap of his knee against a bookshelf or a desk could set off the pain for several hours, and he couldn't run or move at a pace much faster than a scuttling limp. It was the reason he had retired from the Aurors. They would have kept him on, gladly, working a desk job or instructing trainees in the sort of classes that one didn't need to walk for, but Harry hadn't needed the half-awed, half-pitying glances that came his way. He had enough pity for himself, which he knew he needed to overcome or he would drown in it. And he couldn't overcome it when more was pouring in on every side.  
  
He'd got over it eventually, he thought. The time spent alone, especially in the first few months after his retirement, had done that. But then something like this would happen, he would _forget,_ and he would hate the world.  
  
 _For a little while._  
  
Kreacher offered to bring him the pain-dimming tea that Hermione had brewed for him. Harry refused it and asked for Firewhisky instead. Kreacher dithered, Harry scowled, and in the end Kreacher's anxiety for him to feel better overwhelmed the little elf's fear about what would happen if Hermione found out.   
  
Firewhisky fetched, Harry sipped and sighed. There were a few charms that worked slightly on the pain, and he'd already cast them, but the fastest way was to put a pleasant layer of fuzziness between himself and the world. He always stopped before he reached the level of totally pissed, because neither staggering to the bathroom nor vomiting in the bed was fun.  
  
And this time, he didn't want to get completely drunk, anyway, because his mind was still working on something.  
  
 _There has to be another reason that some families are so lucky in their children and some aren't._  
  
*  
  
Harry sipped at his Hangover Potion and squinted at the list of numbers in front of him. They were figures for numbers of children in various generations. They varied between 7 and 12 at first, because the lucky families would have multiple children who would go on to produce multiple children of their own, but they became a depressing line of 1 1 1 1 in the most recent generations.  
  
"What is the _secret_?" Harry said aloud. "I think I'm onto something, but I wish I knew what it _was._ "  
  
He shook his head and levered himself carefully out of the chair, grabbing his cane so that he stood a chance of making it across the kitchen without listing like a broken-masted ship. Kreacher appeared and watched him, but made no move to interfere. Harry nodded his thanks to him. Except for the times like last night when Harry was so badly hurt that he couldn't get up by himself, a lot of the attempts that Kreacher and other people made to help him actually hindered. _He_ was the one who knew what his leg felt like and how to handle it.  
  
He went to the library where Lucy had leaped the other day, and to a row of books that seemed to have little to nothing to do with his topic. He still felt the relentless curiosity driving him to find a solution to his question, but it could bloody _rest_ for a few days, which might mean that he would get some rest, too.   
  
Since he'd been thinking about house-elves on and off for days now, he selected a book about magical creatures on a whim, a book of the kind of stories that most children raised in the wizarding world would have grown up reading, and went into the garden. The black flowers and tangled weeds that had grown here were gone, now. Harry sat down happily on a stone chair, one of those Kreacher had covered with a cushion and cast cleaning spells on, and breathed in the sunlight. The trimmed grass and the flowering rosebushes around him made him stare for a long time, and forget the book lying in his lap.  
  
But when he picked it up and started reading, the stories worked the opposite way, making him forget about the outside world until evening when he dropped it, blinking and shaken.  
  
He'd gone away from the answer, and found it by a different route, as Hermione would say.  
  
 _I...this could be real._


	3. Secrets Between the Lines

  
“Scorpius, when you finish your breakfast—”  
  
“No.”  
  
Draco froze with his head bowed over the parchments in his grasp. He wanted to shake them. No, he wanted to fling them aside and strangle his only son and heir, if he was being honest with himself. But Malfoys didn’t do things like that.  
  
“You haven’t yet heard what I was going to ask you,” he said, as pleasantly as he could, raising his head and frowning at Scorpius.  
  
Scorpius had his chair tipped back from the dining table, his feet hooked under the rim of the table to keep him there. He had Vanished, or at least sent back to the kitchen, the porridge and dry toast that Draco considered a suitable breakfast. Instead, he was eating a huge bowl of custard, lemon or some other disgusting flavor from the yellow color of it, that was dripping all over his lap. As he looked up at his father, some of it fell on his robes.  
  
Draco shut his eyes and turned his head away.  
  
“The answer’s still no,” Scorpius said cheerfully. “It’s no categorically. It’s no phenomenonologically. It’s no epistemologically. It’s no to the ultimate powers of ten.” He swallowed the custard, from the sound, and added, “Al’s been teaching me all about Muggle maths. It’s fascinating. It’s like they’re learning how to _trick_ the universe.”  
  
“You are not acting as befits a Malfoy,” Draco said. He found it hard to watch the spectacle of his son’s table manners, which meant he still couldn’t open his eyes and turn his head back, but at least he could speak his condemnation. He still hoped there was a buried part of his son that would take control someday, the part that had made him such a nice little boy and such a cheerful one when he went back and forth between his divorced parents’ homes. (Divorce wasn’t something Malfoys usually did, either, but it had been Astoria, not born into the family, who initiated the process, and Draco liked to think he had gone along with grace). “You could, if you would listen to my advice more often.”  
  
“Father, dear father,” Scorpius said, and such a disgusting sloppy noise came from his direction that Draco shuddered, not able to imagine what he was stirring into the custard, “you don’t understand. I have no _interest_ in acting as befits a Malfoy. I was born that, yes, but it’s not who I _am_.”  
  
Draco sat up. This was it, then, he thought, his heart pounding and a tingling sensation racing through his arms down to his fingers. This was the moment when Scorpius would challenge him with something he couldn’t ignore, and their armed truce would fall apart. Draco had put up with many things, including his son’s Sorting and his Gryffindor friends and his _Potter_ friend, but he would not put up with Scorpius’s rejection of his birthright. There might still be other ways for Draco to acquire an heir. Forty-four was not _that_ old for a wizard.  
  
“Scorpius,” he said.  
  
“Oh, good,” Scorpius said, and looked up from where he was licking his fingers. The bowl sat on his head, which wobbled back and forth as he tried to keep it balanced. “I thought you were going to start out calling me ‘son.’ Nothing good ever happens when you let yourself be carried away like that.”  
  
Draco opened and closed his eyes, but more was at stake here than the visceral revulsion that made him want to shut them, so he looked. Scorpius sucked noisily at his fingers. Draco braced his hands on the table so he wouldn’t flee.  
  
“If you turn against your heritage,” he began, the same speech that his father had given him twenty-six years ago when they emerged from the war, “then I cannot help you. You take too many things for granted. The privileges that money gives you, your attendance at the best wizarding school in Britain—”  
  
“The _only_ wizarding school in Britain,” Scorpius muttered, taking the custard bowl down from his head and sticking his tongue out to lap the sides, which muffled his words. Draco didn’t listen until he lifted his head again and added helpfully, “At least, the only one for wizards of our age.”  
  
“Your attendance,” Draco continued grimly, and then had to add something to the speech that Lucius had never had to. “Even if you did spend your youth in a House that is not the one I would have chosen for you.”  
  
Scorpius grinned at him, but it was his challenge-grin, on the edge, flashing out like a sharpened sword. (And Draco sometimes hated the ridiculous similes that his mind worked in). “Bloody good thing you weren’t in charge of the choice, then, isn’t it?” he asked quietly.  
  
“Language,” Draco said.  
  
“That’s something that matters in public, and in school.” Scorpius yawned, and stuck his fingers in his mouth again, swirling them around. Draco winced again simply because it wasn’t _decent_. “Not here, not in the embrace of my—” the fingers popped out again, and he shook them at Draco, sending a few drops of custard flying into the middle of the table, where a house-elf promptly appeared to clean them up “—loving family.”  
  
“That is what I am saying, Scorpius,” Draco said. Lucius had been able to act subtly with Draco, but interaction with Gryffindors had destroyed any natural gift for that that Scorpius had. “I intend to disown you if you continue your current disrespect.”  
  
Scorpius blinked, and finally put down the custard bowl. Draco felt a warm glow of relaxation in the center of his stomach. Not that he thought he had won, not yet, but getting his feckless son’s attention was a real achievement.  
  
“You’ve never said that before,” Scorpius said. “Not even when I acted a lot more obnoxious than I’m acting right now. What changed?”  
  
“Your continual disrespect for your name,” Draco said. “You’ve shown that you don’t think blood matters, that your heritage does not set you apart from other wizards.”  
  
Scorpius blinked extremely fast, several times. Draco thought he had never before heard his belief phrased in that way, and he would object that that wasn’t what he had meant. Draco almost held his breath. He was fond of Scorpius, in the reserved way that _should_ be characteristic of relations between them, and he did not particularly want to produce another heir. He hoped Scorpius would choose the right thing, say the right thing.  
  
“That’s because,” Scorpius said slowly, “blood doesn’t matter a whit, and my heritage proves nothing. Except that we’re good at being poisonous wankers sometimes, and we object to the label of bastard just because we’re so careful of our marriages. I’ll give you that.”  
  
Draco rose to his feet. He was shaking. He pointed his finger at the far door of the dining room, but that shook, too. “Get _out_ ,” he said, lowering his arm and his voice at the same time, wishing that he had the vocal control Lucius had had. That would produce the best image of the patriarch in a rage, the only one likely to fetch Scorpius back now.  
  
But Scorpius rose to his feet with a slow, gentle, sad sort of look on his face, and Draco realized that he really must be too far gone. Nothing was going to rescue him now, and the Ministry had no more Time-Turners.  
  
“I was planning to leave today anyway,” Scorpius said gently, and turned and walked out of the room.  
  
Draco clenched his fists, breathing hard. He wanted to hit something, as he had many times since the war. But as always, his father’s advice came back to him.  
  
 _Now, more than ever, a Malfoy must do what befits a Malfoy. There is only one way for us to act if we would not be subject to the laughter of our enemies in the chambers of our minds, from which we cannot chase it out. Be dignified, be proper, and above all, never show_ improper _emotions. Too much vehemence is deadly._  
  
So Draco did not hit something, or curse something, or chase after Scorpius and shout. He sat down, pulled his parchments towards him, and began to make legal notes for disinheriting Scorpius and practical ones for siring another child.  
  
*  
  
“No.”  
  
Draco stared at Astoria through the fire, and then folded his legs more securely under him, shaking his head. Those were the only ways that he would express the intense emotions burning in him. She would get to see no more. Since she had forsaken his bed and his house, that was the way it had to be. “What?”  
  
“I said no.” Astoria ran a single strand of her bright hair around a finger and smiled at him. “I care about our son, Draco. I understand that you might have trouble with him. I always thought he was more Greengrass than Malfoy.”  
  
Draco opened his mouth to ask if Greengrass heirs regularly ate custard with their fingers at breakfast, but Astoria was talking on, looking into the distance in that gentle, unfocused way she had that Draco hated. She wasn’t focusing on what was in _front_ of her, what had to be _dealt_ with. She dealt very little with reality at all, Draco had found. “He tests your boundaries partially because he can, and partially because he knows that you’re still disappointed in him for not Sorting Slytherin.”  
  
“Of course I am,” Draco said, when he had spent a moment considering Astoria’s words and the angle that she seemed to think she had in them, something new and unexpected. “When one breaks a thousand-year tradition—”  
  
Astoria made a rude noise. “Draco, your family’s records don’t go back that far. The _point_ is, no, I won’t help you conceive another child to be your heir, because I think the one you have is fine. It’s your standards and expectations that need to change.”  
  
Draco closed his eyes, opened them. “The marriage contract said that you would bear an acceptable child for me,” he said. “A pure-blood, a Malfoy, a son. If that middle condition hasn’t been fulfilled, then you still owe me a child.”  
  
Astoria looked at him and sighed longingly. Draco straightened. That was more like it.  
  
“How is it,” Astoria whispered, “that you’ve been gifted with the looks of a god and the mind of a pompous arse?”  
  
Draco stared at her, and said nothing. Astoria had sometimes said unexpected things to him, beginning with the words, “I want a divorce,” but she had never been openly rude to him before.   
  
“There’s nothing wrong with our son,” Astoria said, her eyes glinting with the hard sheen of jewels in the firelight. “And I happen to know that the greatest Malfoy tradition has always been their ability to adapt to what’s around them. Your grandfather Abraxas extended charity to Healers because that was in fashion at the time. Your father served the Dark Lord and then decided that he wouldn’t anymore for the thirteen years that the Dark Lord was apparently dead. Draco, you’re living a fossilized existence, a frozen one. There’s no reason for that. Accept that your son is riding the wave of the future, and follow him.”  
  
“Our son doesn’t respect his birth,” Draco said. “His blood. I thought you would care about that at least as much as I do.”  
  
Astoria gave him a thin smile. “Perhaps if I had borne a child who took my birth name, I would have,” she replied. “As it is, Draco, I was a second daughter. I saw from the outside all the time, and that included that the nonsense about an only son and heir was just that, nonsense. My parents never raised me to think that blood purity was as important for me as it would be for my sister. Scorpius is the best of both you and me, Greengrass and Malfoy. Accept that, and stop making silly statements.”  
  
“You won’t help me,” Draco said, to make sure.  
  
Astoria shook her head.  
  
“Then you leave me no choice,” Draco said, and stood up to walk away from the fireplace.  
  
“If you hurt Scorpius, then you will leave _me_ none.”  
  
The words were spoken gently, but Draco remembered the conversation they’d had right after the divorce, when Astoria told him that she knew curses that would replace the blood in his veins with the blood of a Muggle. He would no longer be a Malfoy anymore if he hurt Scorpius, that much was certain.  
  
“I would rather lose my blood claim to be a Malfoy,” Draco said, turning around and looking down his nose at her, “than permit someone who was unworthy to rule after me.”  
  
“Disinheriting him does not involve hurting him,” Astoria said, and then paused and shook her head as if only now noting his choice of words. “ _Rule after you_? What, Draco? An empty house, an empty suite of rooms where you have no wife, empty land that’s filled with peacocks you can’t tame and can’t get rid of? What heritage does Scorpius have there to be proud of?”  
  
Draco shut the Floo connection down. It was rude, but this was only Astoria, who would report no rudeness of his in case it reflected badly on her for marrying him in the first place. Draco knew that Daphne, in particular, hadn’t truly approved of the match and would still tease Astoria for it if she complained.  
  
 _This is my security that my divorce is not gossiped about. The pride of the woman who left me, not my own._  
  
Draco closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with one hand. He would not yield to the pettiness trying to crush him down, Scorpius’s bad manners and his choice to go into Gryffindor and lead an entirely unworthy life, but sometimes he wondered how it had come to this.  
  
 _It was so easy for Father…_  
  
Well, the war hadn’t been easy, Draco had to admit. But he had handled even the aftermath of that with wit and courage. He had stood up to his enemies, the ones who had hurled accusations of crimes he hadn’t committed at him in the courtroom, and faced them down with silence that made Draco’s face burn to think about it. His enemies had been tiny, yapping dogs next to him. Lucius Malfoy knew how to live, how to lead, how to rule.   
  
He had died early, at least for a wizard, because the world had been too much for him. He could not live with a world where the best scions of pure-blood families abandoned their birthrights—Millicent had married a _Muggle,_ for Merlin’s sake—and the Ministry became a safe road to politics instead of the dangerous one he had delighted in, among the best opponents. He had lived to see Scorpius born. Draco was glad that he had not lived long enough to see him grow up.  
  
Draco knew that he looked a lot like his father (and he would pay no attention to Astoria’s claim that his hairline was receding. He knew that for a trick of the light, and sometimes of enchanted mirrors). He didn’t know why he hadn’t also inherited Lucius’s air of easy command, and above all, his command of _self_. Draco had to hold himself back from hitting and shouting at people. Lucius Malfoy had never had the impulse.  
  
Draco took a deep, wavering breath, and then shook his head. No. He wouldn’t yield to the despair, wouldn’t succumb. He should have given up on organizing the family’s debts and vaults and legal standing long ago if he was going to do that, and forced his mother and Astoria to take it over. No. He had to make plans about acquiring another heir.  
  
A child-contract, a temporary but legal arrangement with a pure-blood woman who would grant him use of her womb in exchange for Galleons, seemed like the best solution. But Draco wanted to do some research first. All the pure-bloods of his generation had miscarried at least once, or, like Astoria, refused to have any but one child. He wanted a _healthy_ second heir in addition to one of the right bloodline. It would do no good if the child never survived to come into his inheritance.  
  
*  
  
 _No.  
_  
Draco laid the newspapers down and looked out the window at the rain, which, as usual, was pattering down on the gardens as though it was choosing just the right spots to fall. The drops were huge, he noted dimly, so large he wouldn’t have been surprised to see one of them reflecting his sober face.  
  
So. Pure-blood families of his generation had experienced numerous miscarriages, stillbirths, or attempts at conception that were futile for years.  
  
Draco reached over and turned the nearest paper to face him. He would have thought that was an effect of bad luck, or perhaps the amount of Dark magic used during the war, and so confined to Britain. He would have looked to the Continent for a wife, perhaps even Ireland if the statistics weren’t the same there.  
  
But no. The newspapers that did articles on it took the trouble to research the conditions of the newest pure-blood generation in other countries as well, perhaps because they knew a thorough story would frighten their readers more. It wasn’t only English witches who had trouble carrying to term, or English wizards who had trouble fathering children. It happened in Australia, in China, in South Africa, in Egypt, in France. Everywhere that tradition-oriented pure-blood wizards volunteered the information, the same plague had spread.  
  
Draco curled his lip. Muggleborns didn’t seem to have trouble breeding, and as for Weasleys, they spawned like they breathed. But he was not so desperate for a child that he would turn to someone of inferior blood or a hereditary enemy.  
  
 _Yet._  
  
Draco sighed, and started to put the newspapers together in a neat pile. The _Daily Prophet_ would sell older issues to those who specifically asked for them, but Draco saw no reason to keep them once he had convinced himself of the facts in the articles. He would return the papers to the publishers via double owl and request a refund.  
  
Because the shuffling of the papers made little noise and his son made much, he was aware of Scorpius and Potter before they were aware of him. They came bouncing and bounding down the corridor outside the library, laughing and tossing something back and forth between them that made a noise like several bowls of custard. Draco started to rise to his feet, mouth open, although he didn’t know whether he would begin his scolding with the way they had disrupted the peace of the Manor or the fact that they were here when they _definitely_ should have been in school.  
  
“Your dad’s _brilliant_.”  
  
Draco felt a sneer twist his mouth. That was Scorpius, of course. Potter would never speak of Draco that way, either old Potter or younger Potter. And Scorpius was unlikely to tell either of them the truth about complicated Potions theory, Draco’s claim to brilliance, when they couldn’t begin to understand it.  
  
“I don’t know about that,” Potter said, and snorted. Draco imagined the mucus that would coat the walls of the Manor from that noise, and barely restrained a shudder. “He’s mostly interested in children, as far as I can tell, right now. He keeps muttering about how he thinks he’s solved the problem of why your lot can’t have them, but then he says that no one would believe him.”  
  
Barely breathing, Draco cast a Notice-Me-Not Charm on himself and then stepped towards the door of the library. He leaned soundlessly on the doorframe. Potter and Scorpius had come to a stop not far from him.  
  
Potter wore the dapper robes and Slytherin-green tie that should have been Scorpius’s lot in life. Draco felt a distant envy there, but he could not have said who he envied, his old school rival for having such a son or the imaginary version of himself who did. Scorpius, as usual, had tied his Gryffindor tie around his neck like a collar and had a series of ribbons in his hair, this time intertwined on the back of his head in the shape of a heart.  
  
“ _Your_ lot?” Scorpius repeated, scowling at Potter. “You’re practically a pure-blood yourself.”  
  
“Not according to people like your dad,” Potter retorted, slapping one hand against his knee. “He’ll always think I’m tainted because of Grandmother Lily.”  
  
“Fuck my dad,” Scorpius said. Draco closed his eyes, opened them. “Anyway. Come on. We still haven’t tested that potion that’s supposed to make Jamie fly.” He hoisted the dog under his arm that Draco had missed seeing because his eyes refused to look at the mongrel on principle, and then ran away. Potter trailed him, a quiet smile on his face.  
  
Draco thought about going after them, but that would mean admitting he had eavesdropped. A Malfoy would not do that.  
  
Besides, he had something to think about. That Potter the Elder was doing research on pure-blood fertility was ridiculous, of course; Draco remembered the quality of his “research” in Hogwarts, and knew he would find nothing unless Granger was helping him.  
  
But perhaps Draco could give his research a proper direction. He had heard that Potter had retired several years ago, and had divorced his wife also, and spent most of his time alone. Draco might show up, challenge him, and learn anything of value Potter had discovered. It would be proper for a Malfoy to challenge an old enemy.  
  
He cast a glance over his shoulder at the papers.  
  
It was, at least, better than sitting here and sorting over the fragments of his life.


	4. Controversy On the Horizon

  
“Oof.”  
  
Harry blinked and stepped back. Trust him to be paying enough attention to his knee this morning to walk straight, but not enough to avoid hitting Victoire as she stepped out of the main library with a book in her hand.  
  
Harry smiled at her and nodded to the book she held, which looked like one on wedding traditions he had delved through when he thought it might hold a clue to the mystery of pure-blood infertility. “Is that serving as a source for your wedding?”  
  
Victoire still blushed brightly when she wanted to, although in this case, Harry didn’t think she particularly _wanted_ to. She glanced down at the book and blew off a piece of dust that didn’t technically need to be there. “Well, since things didn’t work out with Teddy, exactly,” she said, and let her voice trail off.  
  
Harry patted her shoulder. “You know that it still might.” Victoire and Teddy had dated off and on for years now, though mostly off lately, since Teddy had developed a fascination with hunting Lethifolds and gone off to Brazil to practice his Patronus Charm on them.  
  
“I know,” Victoire said, and gave him a dazzling smile, a little softened from the one her mother still turned on Bill to make him melt. “And I thought he was right when he said that we should wait to get married and have children, because there were so many things that both of us wanted to do first.” She stared vaguely down at the book, her fingers moving over its brown leather cover. “Only now I can’t remember what those things _were_. Or maybe I’ve done all of them. And sometimes I wonder if there’s some reason that so many of my friends had something wrong with their children, and if we’ll hurt our chances if we wait.” Her fingers closed spasmodically over the book’s spine.  
  
Harry swallowed, his throat so tight that he couldn’t speak. He wanted to tell her that she had nothing to worry about, that neither she nor Teddy did, but then she would want to know how he knew, and…  
  
 _You might not be right. And say you are right. How in the world are you going to get the pure-blood families who are suffering to change things? You know it’s not a change that they’ve been willing to make even with Hermione fighting for twenty-six years._  
  
That was the problem. If the solution had been simple, Harry would have shouted it from the rooftops. But it wasn’t, and it would just make people hate him if he pretended it was.  
  
Victoire shook herself out of her mood and said, “Anyway, Uncle Harry, I did come over here to borrow the book from you, but also to make lunch for you.”  
  
“Kreacher’s lunches for Master Harry are being the most nourishing!” Kreacher said, appearing in the middle of the room and staring about with folded arms, the way he always did when someone mentioned food in his vicinity.  
  
Harry suppressed his groan and smiled at Victoire. “I think that, for one day, we can spare Kreacher,” he said. “Kreacher, why don’t you get started on the dinner for tonight? You know that roast I like can take hours to prepare.”  
  
“Master Harry is being very wise,” Kreacher said, bobbing his head. He paused as if listening to the echo of his own words, then amended carefully, “Master Harry is being very wise _sometimes._ ” Then he disappeared back to the kitchen.  
  
Harry raised his eyebrows at Victoire. “What did you have in mind?”  
  
“Well, _actually_ ,” Victoire said, after looking both ways to make sure that Kreacher wouldn’t actually appear again, and then took a small square object out of her robe pocket and waved her wand over it. Harry laughed as the square thing became a basket, out of which Victoire took a tablecloth that she spread over the nearest stool and then steaming, hot scones, thick sandwiches dripping with meat, neat pats of butter, shining strawberries, and cups of pumpkin juice.  
  
“Did you make that, or did Molly?” Harry asked, sitting down in the chair nearest the stool and extending his leg so that his knee would be quiet. Victoire pulled out some plates, too, and put a sandwich and some strawberries on one before she handed it over.  
  
“I can make _some_ things, Uncle Harry,” Victoire said, with a sniff. Then she looked away and mumbled, “Anyway, I made the sandwiches.”  
  
Harry toasted her with his and said, “It’s good. I’m sure Teddy will appreciate it when he feels that it’s time to get married.”  
  
Victoire smiled again, but she looked a little pained, and Harry made sure to change the subject and talk about her job as an apprentice Healer and some of the milder and more amusing stories from his Auror career for the rest of the lunch. He knew that the real reason Teddy was afraid of having children was his fear that they’d inherit lycanthropy from his side of the family, even though Teddy himself hadn’t. But he didn’t think he could betray Teddy’s confidence that way. Just encourage him to keep writing and talking to Victoire until he trusted himself enough to say it aloud.  
  
 _I wish someone could encourage me to talk about this bloody secret._  
  
Harry imagined doing so…  
  
And winced as he thought of the angry newspaper articles, the denunciations from the families whose genealogies he’d traced, the attention and the limelight that would descend on him. He hadn’t chosen to retire, but one good thing about it was that it got him away from the more ridiculous sorts of attention that might otherwise follow him.  
  
“Uncle Harry? I can stop talking about Mrs. Flitworth’s wounds, if you’d rather.”  
  
Victoire had seen his flinch. Harry returned to the conversation and shook his head, smiling. “That’s okay. I’m not _that_ sensitive, just because someone is talking about knees.”  
  
Victoire smiled and chattered happily on. Harry listened with half an ear, and told himself over and over again that he had a happy life, he had a good life, and if he didn’t do any research again for fear of what he might find, that was all right. His children and nephews and nieces would fill it up.  
  
And yet the notebooks sat up in his study, casting a shadow on his mind from here, heavier than the pain in his knee was most of the time.  
  
 _I have to tell someone about them. If I can ever figure out how. If there was someone else who would present the research as their own, maybe…_  
  
*  
  
“Master Harry is not having visitors this morning.”  
  
Harry blinked and put aside the book on house-elves he’d been reading in a desperate attempt to convince himself that his suspicions were false. Instead, new confirmation stared out from every page, and it would only depress him if he continued.  
  
“Kreacher?” he called. He was most certainly receiving visitors that morning, he always was, although in the case of visitors like Al and Scorpius, he preferred to receive a little warning first. “Who is it?”  
  
There was a long pause, and Harry thought he heard the elf grumbling to himself the way he did when Harry interrupted his attempt to make yet another new hot poultice for his knee. Then Kreacher appeared in the doorway of the study and bowed to him. “Master Harry is being courteous,” he said. “Master Draco Malfoy is not.”  
  
Harry frankly stared. He hadn’t had any contact with Malfoy since the war, other than the slight nods and short exchanges of words that had been necessary when Al and Scorpius started visiting each other and one of their parents had to escort them to the other’s house. Even that had largely stopped after the boys were old enough to Floo reliably on their own. The idea that Malfoy would come to visit him on his own was preposterous.  
  
 _It has to have something to do with the boys._ Harry started to stand, and then ended up sitting down again very fast and putting his head in his hands. His face felt cold against his palms.  
  
“Master Harry Potter is _not_ having visitors,” Kreacher said, his voice low and dangerous.  
  
Harry spent a moment gritting his teeth, and thought about what would happen if he sent Malfoy away. Maybe nothing at first, but then he thought Scorpius would feel disappointed, or perhaps it would interfere in his friendship with Albus. That was the last thing Harry wanted to do. Scorpius spent enough time hinting darkly at how upset his father was with him for Sorting into an un-Malfoy House and making friends with some of the Gryffindor Muggleborns. Harry didn’t want to snub Malfoy in a way that he might take out on his son.  
  
“No,” he said, looking up and catching Kreacher’s eye just as he was about to pop out of the room. “No, Kreacher, I _forbid_ you to tell him that.”  
  
Kreacher spent a few minutes staring at Harry. Then he said, tentatively, “Master Harry Potter is not needing visitors.”  
  
“No, but I want them,” Harry said, and leaned back in his chair, casting the spells that would keep his leg up and extended, embedded in an invisible cast of air. He didn’t like using them most of the time, because it made him look awkward and ridiculous, and the people he loved knew the reason he might freeze or wince in pain. For Malfoy, though, staying comfortable enough to keep calm was important. “Send Malfoy up.”  
  
Kreacher stood there for a long moment, hovering as though Harry really would change his mind at any moment. Then he sighed gustily and shook his head so hard that the rough hairs in his ears bobbed. “Master Harry Potter is going to be regretting this,” he predicted gloomily, and turned away so that he could fetch Malfoy.  
  
Harry thought he might, too, but there were things more important than his immediate comfort.  
  
 _Like the need to tell your secret to someone._  
  
Harry told his thoughts to shut up. This wasn’t about him.  
  
*  
  
Draco, grudgingly, had to admit that he wasn’t ashamed of visiting Potter’s home, at least not in the sense that he had to physically flinch from the paper on the walls or the soft carpet of the stairs beneath his feet. The carpet was horribly out of fashion, yes, and not even Potter’s house-elf could restore some of the shine to the ancient furnishings. But Draco could relax some of the preemptory wince he’d been carrying about.  
  
There was no guarantee that would last when he actually got into Potter’s study, of course. And it didn’t. The faux-marble fireplace was enough to make Draco curl his lip and wish he could give a lecture on design without Potter taking it amiss.  
  
He looked, and there was Potter himself, leg extended out into the air in front of him in a silly fashion, bobbing his head a little. “Malfoy,” he said. “Hullo. Sit down if you like.”  
  
Draco did take a chair across from Potter, but all the while, he also studied him critically, trying to see if there was anything more heroic about Potter than there had been the day he defeated the Dark Lord, as all the papers tended to insist.  
  
No. Potter still looked as rumpled and rough as ever, his hair having only a passing acquaintance with comb or brush. Having seen Potter at school, Draco knew it probably had and this was just the way Potter _looked,_ but still. There were such things as Straightening Charms. Draco would have studied them religiously by now had he not been born with a natural advantage in that area. (Which was _not_ thinning, whatever Astoria said.)  
  
Potter could have been any one of a hundred older wizards at home, really, if not for that lightning bolt scar. He wore a ragged green jumper that probably represented a Weasley crime scene with yarn, and Muggle jeans that at least looked clean and unslept-in. His glasses were small, thin, with a touch of gold on the rim. Draco wondered who had advised him to replace the monstrosities he’d worn in school. It could have been anyone from Granger to a Ministry publicity representative.  
  
 _No, probably Granger. I doubt that he’d listen to anyone else._  
  
“What brings you here?” Potter asked, in the scraping voice of someone who had got tired of waiting for Draco to make the first move.  
  
Draco privately rolled his eyes, but decided that he might as well speak. It wasn’t as though Potter would ever guess why he had come. “I heard my son saying that you’ve been doing research into fertility problems, the problem of pure-bloods having children,” he said. “I have a personal interest in that matter myself, at the moment. I want to know what you’ve learned so far, and—” the word stuck in his throat, but it was true “—help.”  
  
Potter stared at him, his jaw hanging. Draco made a motion as though he would close it in spite of himself, because it looked so _stupid._ Potter seemed to pick up on Draco’s feelings a moment later and shut it, flushing as he did so.  
  
“I, ah,” he said. “Well. It’s true that I’ve found something—”  
  
 _No, you haven’t,_ Draco thought. _Granger found something, or you’ll find it under my direction. But on your own? No, I don’t think you’ve changed that much._  
  
“But I don’t know, it could be nothing,” Potter said, and frowned into the distance for a moment, raising his hand as though he was going to shove the glasses back and off his face. “Other people have been in this field before me. I’m sure _someone_ must have discovered the reason that some families like the Weasleys can have lots of children and others can’t.” His eyes drifted to Draco for a moment.  
  
“In my wife’s case, it was by choice,” Draco said, and tried to make his voice as stiff as Potter’s leg looked. It was the only way Draco thought he would _learn_. “To bear a single son, that is. But I doubt that many people have done research on this. Too many think they know the answer already.”  
  
“Mingling with Muggleborns?” Potter shook his head. “The Weasleys haven’t actually done a lot of that, although they’re friendly with them. And they keep having children. While the Bones family has married Muggles sometimes, and they keep having lots of children. And pure-blood families like the Longbottoms who never opposed people like Hermione and my mum coming into the wizarding world still don’t have many children.”  
  
Draco raised his eyebrows. “It sounds as though you’ve already looked into this extensively.”  
  
Potter shrugged. “I think I have. But what I found is…strange. Like I said, someone must have found it before me and discovered a reason that it couldn’t be true. I’m such a newcomer into this field that almost anything might be true.” He ducked his head as though he wanted to avoid Draco’s gaze.  
  
“Perhaps you should tell me what you’ve found,” Draco suggested, smoothly. “I may not be an expert in the field of blood genealogies, but I _am_ an expert in pure-blood families, and living within them. I may be able to tell you if your find means anything.”  
  
It would mean nothing, of course, but it could provide a foundation to build upon. Draco had learned that particular trick when pursuing his own Potions researches. Studies by inferior scholars that meant nothing by themselves would become important and meaningful when placed into their proper context, by him.  
  
*  
  
Harry spent a second studying Malfoy. On the one hand, he really had no reason to refuse. If he was wrong or mistaken, Malfoy could tell him, and set the worrying part of his mind at ease.  
  
On the other hand, Malfoy was one of the people Harry was sure would hate his conclusion and insist on denying it.  
  
 _You want it denied, remember?_  
  
In the end, Harry raised his wand and summoned the books and the records he’d been working with from his study. They skimmed through the air and settled obediently into place on the stool, and he opened the folder on top and pulled out his notes, holding them towards Malfoy—who, he noted, took them with a grimace of distaste, perhaps for Harry’s Muggle blood and perhaps for his handwriting.  
  
“You could make things simpler by _telling_ me,” Malfoy said distantly, and looked at the top sheet, the list of numbers for pure-blood families who had both children and house-elves, flicking past it in instants.  
  
Harry cleared his throat. “I found out that families who have house-elves have fewer children. The Weasleys don’t have them, haven’t had them for centuries. But then I thought, that doesn’t work, because the Bones still own some, don’t they? Then I found out that Susan’s died years ago, and there were only two anyway, and they both were treated kindly while they were there. Because that’s it.”  
  
“What’s it?” Malfoy had his lip curled so far this time that Harry could make out a whole row of teeth. Idly, Harry wondered if he would be able to stand staying in the same room with Harry long enough to hear what he’d found.  
  
“How someone _treats_ the house-elves,” Harry said. “Not whether they have them or not, not even whether they let them raise their children or not. How they treat them. House-elves with families that hunted them or abused them or mounted their heads on the walls—those are the notes on the bottom—well, those families have fewer children. So the biggest families are either the ones without house-elves at all or the ones who don’t hurt them.”  
  
Malfoy’s hands froze on the papers, and a moment later, he looked up at Harry. Even having anticipated what this news might do to him, Harry still flinched at what he saw in his eyes.  
  
*  
  
 _No. No, that cannot be possible._  
  
“I should have known,” Draco said, surprised in spite of himself by the way his voice hissed and rattled like a snake imprisoned in a cage. “Granger’s passion for freeing them has—infected you. And was it an elf who told you this? Or a hallucination from the pain potions that you presumably have to take for your leg?”  
  
Potter narrowed his eyes, but didn’t rise to the bait. That only infuriated Draco further. To have him sit there, all calm and cool, and not respond to the conflict between them the way Draco did, was maddening.  
  
“I looked up information on house-elves in several books,” Potter said quietly. “I got the idea from a book of stories about how magic used to belong to everybody, when it first came into the world. Wizards and house-elves and centaurs and merfolk and dragons and the rest of them. They lived in harmony—well, when the dragons weren’t killing and eating everyone, I suppose—because they recognized themselves as kin to each other. They were connected. They couldn’t break apart. The Fountain of Magical _Brethren._ The Ministry still has some old vestiges of the idea.”  
  
“Don’t take up public speaking,” Draco advised him, his spine still crackling with the emotions that surged along it. “You’re not suited for it.”  
  
“One of the reasons I never made the speeches about Voldemort’s defeat that they always wanted me to make on the anniversary of the war,” Potter said, and ignored the way that the Dark Lord’s name went home like a crossbow bolt to Draco’s gut. “I think this is right. I think this is true. It didn’t matter if the house-elves were servants, maybe that was even the place they wanted, just like some stories talk about brownies or other fairies helping humans in return for some consideration. But if you stop giving the fairies consideration, they leave the household. The house-elves couldn’t leave, but the magic could take its revenge. When we forgot about the way that we were bound to everyone else, then the magic recoiled back on us.”  
  
Draco shook his head. “What evidence do you have? Guts. Instinct. Intuition. Children’s stories.”  
  
Potter shrugged, his hands dangling down to the sides on the ends of his wrists, exactly the way a Mudblood’s hands _would_ dangle, Draco thought, breathless with his own contempt. His heart slammed and roared in his ears, and he had to concentrate to hear Potter’s reply. “That’s why I want someone else to look at this and tell me I’m wrong. I have to be, right? It almost doesn’t make sense. It seems someone else would have found this. But I don’t know. If I can find my way to this conclusion and not see anything else wrong with it, someone else still might.”  
  
Draco dived back into the files with silent but renewed determination. He was going to be the one to set Potter’s research on the correct track, after all, though by scorching the conclusions Potter had drawn instead of leading him to them. What Potter suggested sounded nebulous and mystical, and therefore unacceptable.  
  
It could not be that mistreating house-elves—as Potter would put it—had cost his contemporaries their ability to have children. If magic existed that would punish them, it must be wiser than that and realize how often the house-elves brought it on themselves.  
  
Potter could not be right.  
  
*  
  
Harry watched the way Malfoy’s cheeks and eyes glowed, and half-nodded. Yes, that was one of the reasons he had been reluctant to tell anyone about this. They would argue that it wasn’t possible to change the way they treated house-elves, and it wouldn’t really matter whether he was _right_ or not. Because contemplating that he was right would cause them to contemplate the enormous change they would need to make.  
  
And that was something they wouldn’t do.  
  
Harry rolled his neck to the side, cracking it. He noticed the irritated twitch Malfoy’s lips made and subsided again, shutting his eyes. His leg ached. The cushioning spells held it still, but sometimes that was a good thing and sometimes that was a bad thing. At the moment, it was obviously bad. He could never predict it, though. He rubbed slowly up and down his leg with one palm.  
  
Malfoy was a little different than Harry had thought he would be, from Scorpius’s reports. Those had made it sound like the git who had irritated Harry in school hadn’t changed, and he hadn’t looked forward to meeting him. He would jump and shout like always, and Malfoy would shout back, and they would get nothing accomplished.  
  
But somehow…  
  
Maybe it was just that he’d had to grow up and learn patience when he had children, or when his leg got wounded and he had to retire. There were some things that couldn’t be changed, no matter how wondrous the magic. Malfoy’s character seemed to fall into that category, too. Harry could ignore his little gestures now and concentrate on the words that he was saying.  
  
Maybe Malfoy could help him avoid it somehow, the attention that Harry was afraid would come his way whether or not this was true, the consequences if it _was_. Because he knew he would have to fight for something that affected the wizarding community, something that could affect him personally if his children or his nieces and nephews wanted to marry into families that had that problem with their fertility. There wasn’t a lot that Harry wouldn’t do for the happiness of the people he loved.  
  
But the thought of the wearying uphill climb, of battle coming just as he had got used to not fighting, made his teeth grind.  
  
So he sat there, in the sunlight, his eyes shut and his hand rubbing at his leg, glad he had banished Kreacher from the room already so he couldn’t notice the rubbing and decide Harry should be in bed, and waited for Malfoy to tell him he was wrong.  
  
 _Please, Malfoy. Tell me I’m wrong._


	5. Foundations

  
“You’re wrong.”  
  
Harry blinked, and opened his eyes. It had been long enough, with Malfoy flipping through papers and sometimes turning them over to make his own notes, that he had fallen into a doze. Malfoy was leaning forwards across the stool to stare at him now, with a half-sneer on his face that said _he_ never would have fallen asleep in a position this vulnerable.  
  
That was probably true, but they were in his house and Harry had Kreacher within call, not to mention all kinds of other people in and out all the time. Harry just sat up and nodded, leaning forwards with his hands on his knees. “What did you find?”  
  
Malfoy watched him with twitching fingers. Harry wondered what particular thing about him was provoking contempt this time, and decided that it was probably everything, so it was useless to ask.  
  
Then Malfoy seemed to remember Harry’s question, and shook his head, reaching firmly for the list in front of him. “There have been plenty of other periods in history when my kind treated house-elves normally,” he said briskly. “What you would call _badly._ ” He flashed Harry a harsh glance, but Harry only sat there and said nothing. If Malfoy wanted to handle it this way, they would. “None of them has affected our fertility this way.”  
  
Harry blinked. “You mean you didn’t read the list on page seven?”  
  
“What the hell are you talking about?” Malfoy asked, his voice not rising as much as Harry had thought it would when he was contradicted. “What are you— _no_ , I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Tell me.” He waved the sheaf of papers in front of him as though he wished they were solid enough to beat Harry over the head with.  
  
Harry held back the sigh and reached out, scooping up the papers. Sure enough, seventh from the top was the sheet of parchment with the numbers from previous centuries listed. “Look,” he said, turning it around so Malfoy could see. “This is the 1700s. There was a liberal Minister then who’d been raised by house-elves, and he passed laws mandating that they not be given certain punishments. No ironing their hands, being forced to cut their ears off, that kind of thing. Look at what happened to the pure-blood family numbers right after _that_.”  
  
Malfoy stiffened and looked at him sideways, but he bent over and stared down at the parchment. Then he said, in an unnaturally loud voice, “So? So what? You think that—you think that it’s _important_ , what you’ve found? That’s a coincidence.”  
  
“I’m sure it looks that way from the outside,” Harry said. “But for two generations after that, while people were still living under those laws and no one had overturned them yet, pure-bloods were having families of four or five children, or more if they wanted them. That was a period when contact with Muggles was pretty rare, too, and the theorists who hold blood prejudices usually attribute the larger families to that. But contact with Muggles was even rarer in the proceeding generation right before that, and what do you see? Small families. One child, two, three if they were lucky and had a woman who was willing to undergo large numbers of miscarriages. When they overturned the laws, then the numbers of children immediately began to shrink again.”  
  
Malfoy closed his eyes, opened them. Then he said, “But there must have been hundreds of other things happening at the same time. There were other laws being passed, and some families would have secret contacts with Muggles to trade with them, and some people would have practiced things then that would seem barbaric today. Why are you so sure that the link is to house-elves? Why not something else?”  
  
“Well, there _is_ something else,” Harry said, and began flipping through his notes again until he found the photograph he’d discovered, and carefully used several complicated charms to copy from the page of the book it had been in to his parchment. “I just don’t think it’s as intimately related, since the house-elves actually live in our families and help us—”  
  
“ _Don’t_ refer to yourself as pure-blood.”  
  
Harry looked up. Malfoy was leaning close enough to touch him now, although of course he held his hands back so that wouldn’t happen, and baring his teeth at Harry. Harry bared his back.  
  
“I was referring to myself as a wizard,” he said. “Look, Malfoy, if you can’t listen to anything I say because of blood prejudice, maybe I should just give you the notes and you can go and investigate them with someone else.”  
  
*  
  
Draco stared at Potter with his skin crawling, in rebellion against the ridiculous idea of him considering himself equal to Draco, and with his head ringing with Potter’s words. That was what he had hoped would happen, hadn’t he? That Potter would turn over control of this research project—what there was of it—to Draco, and he could make it his own work?  
  
Except that he obviously didn’t understand the system that Potter used to organize his own files, because he had gone right past that document about the laws and whatever else Potter wanted to show him. What might he miss if he was away from the man in whose twisted brain it had originated?  
  
Not that he was right, of course. But Draco would have to be more careful and subtle with proof that he was wrong. Make crude arguments, and of course it would be easy for Potter to answer them.  
  
“I can listen,” Draco said, and tried his best to produce the kind of glittering, icy smile that had won Astoria’s heart years ago. “I simply object to you thinking of yourself as part of the same world that produced me.”  
  
Potter gave him a twisted smile, but said nothing, shuffling papers until he arrived at one that bore a photograph and holding it out to Draco. “Here,” he said.  
  
Draco stared. This was an old photograph, black and white and barely moving at all, but he was still sure that the man’s hair was a bright color, that he was a Weasley, and that he held his hand out to a centaur, who was shaking with him. From the trees around them and the length of the trunks, they were in the Forbidden Forest. “So?” he asked.  
  
“He was a fairly high Ministry official, back when the Weasleys had a little more money,” Potter said quietly. “One of those people assigned to deal with centaurs and stay out of trouble, basically—except he actually managed to conclude a treaty with the centaurs, and get them to agree that humans could go in and gather herbs from the Forest, sometimes, as long as they were careful not to intrude on centaur territories.”  
  
Draco shook his head. “I would have heard about that.”  
  
Potter sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “The treaty fell apart two years later, when Rufus Weasley—that’s him—was killed. But for the rest of that century, the Weasleys didn’t even have one of their wives or daughters or sisters die in childbirth, no matter what family they married into, and only one of them miscarried. The one married to a Black, who treated their house-elves horribly.”  
  
“You’re saying,” Draco said, spacing his words apart so that Potter could hear them spoken by someone else and realize how ridiculous he was being, “that the magic keeps track of what we’ve done in relation to magical creatures, and _rations out_ the children we have?”  
  
“It looks like it, doesn’t it?” Potter shuffled through some more papers. “And it’s not only the Weasleys, although there are a lot of references to them, since they were politically active for a while. The Bones family helped some merfolk escape from one lake that was getting overfished and polluted by Muggles to another, and they had thirty children in the next generation. And the Prewetts established a dragon sanctuary and defended it pretty ferociously. That’s when they started having twins.”  
  
Draco reached out a hand and put it on the parchment in front of him, which showed some kind of chart, rising and falling lines with names beside them. The names seemed sometimes to belong to pure-blood families, and sometimes to blood traitors, and sometimes to families that Draco didn’t recognize at all, which must make them Mudbloods. “You only think this,” he said. “You haven’t established it beyond all doubt.”  
  
“I know.” Potter yawned, although he’d just had a nap like the old man he was a short time ago, and scratched at his chin. Draco wrinkled his nose when he noted the faint strip of stubble there. “That’s why I want someone who has more expertise in this to look at it and tell me what I’m doing wrong. Once I start seeing a theory, I see it everywhere, and maybe I’m interpreting things in a way I shouldn’t be. Do you know someone who’s an expert on genealogy and can look it over for me?”  
  
Draco clenched his teeth. Then he said, “That’s me, Potter. I’m your expert.”  
  
Potter eyed him with his eyes half-lidded as though _he_ had any right to examine Draco’s credentials, and his teeth nibbling his bottom lip in a way that Draco found frankly disgusting. “I thought your expertise was in Potions theory, not genealogy,” he said at last.  
  
“I’m a pure-blood,” Draco said. “I learned the family trees by heart. I learned how magic originated, and the reasons that we don’t mingle with Muggles and the way that we intermix with magical creatures and the ways we don’t, by heart. That means I’m the best one to tell you, from an insider’s perspective, how your distorted history of the wizarding world looks.”  
  
Potter rubbed at his eyes with one hand. “All right. It’s not like I care about the blood status of the person who does this.”  
  
 _But you should,_ Draco wanted to tell him. _Don’t you see it? Don’t you_ see? _That’s the reason that this started in the first place. Someone who wasn’t a half-blood should have saved the wizarding world. Your father should have married someone from his own kind. And then nothing of this would ever have happened. We wouldn’t owe our lives and our freedom to someone like_ you.  
  
But Potter wouldn’t react well to that, so Draco confined himself to simply shrugging and saying, “If there’s a question I can’t answer, then there are a few people I can ask discreet questions among. That should be enough.”  
  
He stared into Potter’s eyes, willing Potter to believe him, and rather ready to despise him if he did.  
  
Potter gave a gusty sigh that Draco thought made a spot of saliva touch his arm, and then nodded. “Fine. Then why don’t you take the files home and look at them? I can’t do anything more with them than I already have.” And he pressed the files into Draco’s arms.  
  
Draco snorted and spent a few minutes organizing the stack by feel and then by wand, so that larger pieces of paper were on the bottom and the smaller on top. It seemed as though Potter had made no effort to keep certain kinds, like lists or family trees or charts or photographs, together, and Draco’s way of ordering was better. “I’ll firecall you when I have something to share,” he said.  
  
Potter shrugged and nodded, and the threadbare Weasley jumper gaped a little on his left shoulder. “Sure. My Floo’ll be open.”  
  
Draco stood up and turned around before he could say something that would probably make Potter want to hit him. But it was _true_ that by leaving his Floo open like that, he was opening himself to all sorts of attacks. Draco just couldn’t conceive of a way to tell him about it that wouldn’t sound like a threat.  
  
 _And who knows?_ he thought as he left. _Everyone knows that the atmosphere of Mudblood houses affects your brain. Maybe I’ll glance at this once I’m back home and see the thing that Potter missed, that he_ must _have missed.  
  
We’ve changed so much already. We can’t change anymore, not without losing everything that makes us ourselves.  
  
_ *  
  
“So where is it?”  
  
Harry woke up with a start. He’d dozed off in his chair again, and this time, maybe because he was busy with the roast, Kreacher hadn’t been there to forbid someone from coming to see him. Harry knuckled sleep out of his eyes and then smiled at Hermione. She stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips and her hair almost bristling out from her head. There was a streak or two of grey there, but Harry thought it came more from the stresses of dealing with her children than age.  
  
“Where’s what?” he asked, and yawned. “Hullo, Hermione.”  
  
She came forwards enough to kiss his cheek, and then flopped down in the chair Malfoy had used and looked at him expectantly. With a look at the light coming through the windows, Harry estimated that it had been perhaps an hour since Malfoy left.  
  
“Al mentioned something about your doing research on fertility and pure-blood lines,” Hermione said, eyeing him. “I didn’t have a chance to stop by before. You know how it is with S.P.E.W., always busy.”  
  
Harry snorted quietly. From loyalty to her old self, Hermione wouldn’t change the acronym she’d come up with at fourteen, and she faithfully pronounced the letters separately each time. “I know. Any progress lately?” He asked with more than his usual interest, thinking of the firestorm he would face if he unleashed proof that magic itself wanted house-elves treated differently.  
  
Hermione shrugged, making her hair bounce up and down. “Not really. There have been a few more pure-blood families who agreed that not telling their house-elves to cut off their noses would improve their efficiency.” She grimaced and shook her head. “Imagine. Telling me that they would _consider_ not mutilating other sentient beings. That’s progressive for them.”  
  
“You don’t know the half of it,” Harry muttered, thinking of the way that Malfoy had been so careful not to touch him, and to dissociate himself from even an accidental claim that he and Harry might be part of the same group.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Nothing,” Harry said. “Anyway, I can’t really show you my research right now. Someone else wanted to look at it, and I lent my files and my notes to them.”  
  
Hermione blinked. “Who? I didn’t think anyone else knew about it. It was just chance that I heard Al mention it.”  
  
 _And probably Malfoy heard about it by chance from Scorpius,_ Harry thought. _We’d better hope that neither of them ever works in the Department of Mysteries, or the whole country will know what goes on down there before the end of the week._  
  
Of course, that had its attractive side, too. Before he left the Ministry, Harry had been looking into the idea that the Department of Mysteries did more than its fair share of artifact-vanishing, that the promised publications about them somehow never emerged, and that the people recruited into the Unspeakables had a way of vanishing like the artifacts if they turned out not to fit the Department’s strict needs.  
  
“Oh,” Harry said. “Malfoy. His son mentioned it to him, too, and he thinks that he can find a way to prove me wrong.”  
  
Hermione sat up, and her eyes widened. “ _Malfoy?_ You did at least make a copy of these notes?”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “I don’t think he would destroy them, Hermione. All I’d have to do is say that he did, and you know the full might of the Ministry would fall on him. He can’t stand up against the law, not now, not the way he is, and I think he knows it.”  
  
“But you wouldn’t set the Ministry on him,” Hermione said, her head tilting to the side, those sharp eyes that he knew so well and which knew him in turn staring through his skin to his heart. “That means that he might do it because he knows that he can get away with it. And then come back and _Obliviate_ you for good measure.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “I don’t think so. I really don’t. He doesn’t like what I found, but I think he really wants to prove me wrong, rather than destroy it. He’s been like that for a while,” he added, thinking back to the ways that Malfoy had nodded tightly at him when they saw each other and the interviews he had sometimes given when a reporter dug up news of their rivalry at Hogwarts and reached him for a “comment fifteen years later.” “He doesn’t want to kill me. He’s not that evil, not that bad. He just wants to _surpass_ me.”  
  
He paused, thinking back to other interviews with Malfoy on Potions theory. He’d always read them, just because of Scorpius, and because he knew it would affect Al. “Wants to surpass everybody,” he added more softly. “He’s in competition with the world, and he probably has been since the war.”  
  
“What did you find?”  
  
Harry looked up, and hesitated. Hermione wouldn’t see what was wrong with his theory, the way she would have if he had discovered real proof that marrying Muggles caused problems with the inheritance of pure-blood magic. She would want to spread it far and wide, she wouldn’t think about the controversy it could cause…  
  
And maybe she was right. Maybe, if he really cared about everybody, about equality and justice, Harry shouldn’t be preparing to fight a battle when the information came out, but should just spread it now, and damn the ones who argued with him.  
  
Except that he couldn’t do that, anymore. He’d learned things in twenty years in the Ministry and through his son’s friendship with someone who came from one of those old pure-blood families. He had learned how they understood the world and how they thought, or something about it, anyway, and he’d learned to respect them as people with their own perspective.  
  
Even if, when it came to blood politics, he thought they were dead wrong.  
  
“Did he convince you not to tell me?” Hermione had drawn the worst conclusions from his silence and was already sitting up straight, her eyes narrowed. “Because if you tell me that he did—”  
  
“He didn’t,” Harry said. “He didn’t do anything except be an annoying arse, which is par for the course. Really, Hermione, it’s _okay_ ,” he added, seeing the way she was staring at him. “It’s all right. I just don’t want to say right now. I would look like an idiot if I was wrong, anyway. You know how new I am at this.”  
  
Hermione wavered for a moment, but she was older, too, and she would listen to him more now. She leaned over and patted his leg, just above the hurt knee. Harry smiled at her. She and Ron were the only ones that he let touch him like that. “Well, okay. Just let me know when you’re ready to discuss it, right? And come to dinner tonight. Everything’s fine.”  
  
Harry knew, and appreciated, that that meant she and Ron had a special chair for him, and that Hugo wouldn’t be there. Hugo had been—well, disappointed, anyway, by the injury Harry had taken, and he had the tendency to ask questions about it that Harry didn’t like. “All right. I will.”  
  
And in the chatter that filled the way Hermione helped him outside, the Apparition, and the dinner with his best friends, Harry managed to let a lot of his worries over Malfoy and the research go. He was probably worrying for no reason. Malfoy would probably find a dozen ways to prove him wrong.  
  
Well. Half a dozen, anyway.


	6. Working a Change

  
Draco sat back and sipped at the glass of water in his hand. He had almost asked the house-elves to bring him something stronger, but he had had that earlier, and he did not want to drink enough to lose track of the papers he was studying. Potter would undoubtedly attack him if Draco lost some of his precious research.  
  
Draco felt his shoulders try to hunch. He quelled that impulse with another sip of his water, and studied the silver signet rings on his left hand until he was sure it was truly gone.  
  
Then he set the cup aside and leaned in to study the papers again. He had arranged them by kind, the way that Potter _should_ have ordered them, on the table in front of him. Lists. Charts. Photographs. Transcripts from official books and court records. At least Potter had some sense; he was looking for more records than just the books that would support his own side, of which there were precious few in the era of wizarding history that he was looking into. Both wizards and magical creatures had known the magical creatures’ place, then.  
  
The evidence looked back at him, and Draco imagined that he could see the letters winking mockingly, the way they would if they were Potter’s eyes. Potter’s _eyes,_ green and taunting and looking as if they never opened on a world of less than innocence and beauty…  
  
Draco took the envy, considered it coldly, and so froze it to death and put it away from him. It was ridiculous to envy Potter when Potter would never have the blood and breeding that Draco did. Perhaps his children could pass for pure if they didn’t mention their mother’s blood traitor status often, but Potter was too close to someone tainted, the manky nature too perfectly balanced with the clean.  
  
No. He had considered the evidence so far, and it was true that he could come up with no theory that Potter could not refute in his head at once, or that the evidence could not refute. But that did not mean that Potter was _right_.  
  
Draco rose to his feet and paced around the table in a circle, head cocked so that he could literally look at the documents from every angle.  
  
*  
  
“Uncle Harry.”  
  
Harry opened his eyes, and smiled. Rose was sitting in the chair beside him, her hair twined around her head in the style of crowning braids that she favored and which had driven Hermione mad when she first began using it. She said that it took twice as long as any other style Rose could have used, and it made her look like a woman twice her age, and why didn’t Rose favor the kind of commonsense, loose hair that Hermione had when _she_ was a teenager?  
  
Of course, that was part of the reason Rose continued to wear it that way, and Hermione had to know it. But Harry could listen to her complain, and listen to Rose defend herself with gentle explanations, and in the end see the argument fade into complacency just as so many arguments between Hermione and her children did.  
  
Except her row with Hugo about the way he treated Harry. Harry sighed as he thought about it. _Hugo was always the most difficult one._  
  
“Uncle Harry, I’m worried about you.”  
  
That drew Harry’s eyes back to Rose, and he frowned, wondering if Al and Scorpius had spread the news of his research even further than to Malfoy and Hermione. “Why?” he asked. “I’m not doing anything dangerous at the moment.” He smiled a little and touched his leg above the knee, in the same place Hermione had touched it yesterday. “This kind of ensures that I can’t.”  
  
Rose frowned at him and reached out with one hand, slowly. Harry raised his eyebrows, and she pulled her hand back. “Sorry,” she said. “I know it’s only Dad and Mum. But…you’re falling asleep all the time in the afternoons. And you’re having more and more trouble walking. Victoire mentioned that,” she added, before Harry could accuse her of bribing Kreacher for information.  
  
Harry sighed and shrugged. “I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep when I was younger. Maybe this is just my body’s way of catching up.”  
  
“I don’t think so,” Rose said, and her voice was so low, her shoulders so tight, that Harry looked more closely at her. He wondered how long this had troubled her. Maybe she was right to have come and disturbed him about this. Harry would rather spend half an hour talking to his nieces and nephews than have them spend that long worrying about him. “I think—that you’re losing track of your life. _Charge_ of your life, maybe. You’re drifting, and you sit here like some grandfather we can come and tell stories to.”  
  
“And ask advice from, and have tea with,” Harry said. “I _like_ that aspect of my life, Rose. I would have done something about it if I didn’t like it.”  
  
Rose nodded, but not as if she believed him. “You aren’t a grandfather,” she said.   
  
“Not for James’s lack of trying,” Harry muttered, remembering the latest scandal, big enough in Romania to hit the papers here—although any news of Harry Potter’s children involved in something like that would hit the English papers, whether the other country thought it was important or not. Luckily, the girl had simply been scared, not pregnant, and James didn’t have to be a father. Harry was not looking forward to the day that he came under the delusion that he could be.  
  
“Will you _listen_ to me?” Rose leaned forwards, and Harry saw her mother in every line of her face. “You’re acting old. You’re _not_ old.”  
  
“Let me number the people who would disagree with you about that on both hands,” Harry said, and held them up. “Molly, Lily, Al, Scorpius—”  
  
“I mean that you’re not old enough to just sit back and watch life go by.” Rose’s hands were tight on the sides of the chair, which meant it was important enough to her to get angry. Harry nodded and listened. “You need an interest. I know that you said you were getting involved in magical research, but it can’t be that interesting if you keep falling asleep as you’re sitting in your chair.”  
  
Harry hesitated on the verge of replying. She was right about the days since he had stopped looking through books. While hunting for solutions to the problem of pure-blood fertility, he had been alive, excited, on edge, in a way that he hadn’t felt since he left the Aurors.  
  
But on the other hand, did he want to be like that all the time? It would suggest that there were endless disturbing problems to solve, and he didn’t want that to be true. Hell, he didn’t want this to be one of them. He wanted Malfoy to come back and tell him that he had imagined everything and he was an idiot.  
  
But Rose was waiting for him, and she was the one who had to be answered before he could come up with any answer for Malfoy, if he would even need one, so in the end he shrugged and said, “This really suffices for now, Rose. I think that I can learn how to be involved with the world again a bit at a time, maybe.”  
  
Rose narrowed her eyes. “You’re thinking about my prat of a brother again. You shouldn’t think about him.”  
  
“Not just him,” Harry said, and gestured towards his leg. If he hit it as hard as he wanted to, he would live with the pain for the rest of the morning. “I really am slower and less capable than I used to be, or I wouldn’t have quit the Aurors.”  
  
“They would have kept you,” Rose muttered. “That’s what Mum said.”  
  
“I know,” Harry said, snapped, really. “But I didn’t want the kind of desk job that they would have given me.”  
  
“Then find something else,” Rose said, and shoved at the air with both hands, as if she could push it towards him and force him to breathe it, in and out, and get his lungs working again. “Uncle Harry…I love you. I really do. But I think someone needs to _challenge_ you, root you out of that chair and make you do something, or your arse is just going to freeze there.”  
  
Harry laughed in spite of himself. “You know your parents would hate to hear you talking like that.”  
  
“They’re not here.” Rose leaned forwards again, insistently. “Will you think about it, Uncle Harry? Think about finding something?”  
  
“I will,” Harry promised.  
  
*  
  
There could have been other laws passed at the time that would have the effect on pure-blood fertility that Potter contemplated. For example, if there had been laws relaxing the Statute of Secrecy and more wizards had mingled with Muggles, that could have meant more pure-bloods with tainted magic and fewer children.  
  
Except, Draco had to admit a moment later, that that wasn’t likely. There had been numerous tests done to see if mere contact with Muggles damaged a pure-blood’s ability to have children, and it did not. Being around them in King’s Cross Station when they went to take their children to the Hogwarts Express, for example, didn’t cause miscarriages in pregnant women.  
  
Perhaps there was another factor, however. What if family size had increased when the laws pushing for good treatment of house-elves were passed not because magic was taking its revenge on wizards, but because of something else associated with that? They had made the house-elves happier, and so the house-elves took better care of their children in response?  
  
But when Draco read his history books, he had to abandon that theory, as well. There had been a fashion in the first of those large generations for witches to care for their children themselves. House-elves were less involved in rearing children than ever before.  
  
 _Which might be another reason that more of us survived, if Potter’s theory is correct._  
  
But Draco did not _want_ it to be correct. And there was more to it than that, than even that, as important as that was to him. He refused to believe that a novice magical researcher had hit on the right solution, the first time out, to a problem that had baffled the finest pure-blood minds.   
  
_Perhaps that’s why he managed to see it and we didn’t. We won’t look at house-elves the same way he did, we would never give them credit for influencing us in this way—_  
  
Draco closed one hand into a fist, and scowled. He would not lash out, of course; it was not something a Malfoy did. But he had to admit that the thought followed him, and troubled him, on his constant dizzy journeys around the table where Potter’s notes were laid out, as he thought and thought and _thought_ about it.  
  
What other explanation could there be? Something as full, as far-ranging, as self-consistent as Potter’s. That was what would ultimately make it a persuasive theory if it was allowed to escape into the world, Draco had to admit. Potter could find answers that he could add to the structure of the theory without changing the essentials of it, and so counter objections like the ones that Draco had tried to raise in his home and was trying to raise now.  
  
 _Assume it is true._  
  
Draco nodded stiffly. He had been obliged to do that in the past, even when he most hated the theories or ideas he was fighting. For example, he had been forced to face the idea in the past few days that Scorpius was unworthy to inherit the Malfoy name, and that was far more devastating than the idea that he was wrong about something Potter was right on.  
  
 _No, it isn’t._  
  
Draco opened his mouth and exhaled like a displaying dragon, all hot breath and soundless air without a roar or flame. Then he sat down hard on the couch he had risen from earlier and put his head in his hands.  
  
So it still mattered that much, after all these years, the need to prove Potter wrong? He hadn’t known that about himself. Yes, he had known he wanted to be the best, and he had wanted to prove _this_ theory wrong because of the changes that it would necessitate in their way of life if it was true. But he longed to prove Potter wrong more than he longed to have a son who was a fit heir?  
  
 _No,_ Draco decided, slowly, after struggling with it for so long that he thought his head might burst. _That’s not it. It’s not—that simple. Winning over Potter is what I want, yes, but there’s more than one way to do that. And proving him wrong doesn’t look like something I can do, not easily._  
  
So Draco would follow his father’s advice, and change the ground. Assume for the moment that Potter’s theory was true. How would Potter go about trying to ensure that pure-bloods treated house-elves better?  
  
Draco snorted. He could just picture it. Tearful appeals before the Wizengamot, saccharine speeches about house-elves being sentient just like wizards, rhetorical questions that would lead the audience along because he was Harry Potter and would make them think they’d never heard anything so profound.  
  
And in the meantime, he would alienate his real audience. Some of them would hate the idea of the change, and others would hate him because he was Harry Potter and had ended the Dark Lord’s dreams, and the rest simply wouldn’t _believe._  
  
Draco shook his head, aware that he was smiling and that it might look frightening from a distance, aware at the same time that Lucius would be proud of him.  
  
If this theory was true, then they needed to spread the truth, because nothing was more important to the future of Draco’s kind than carrying on their families, and having worthy heirs. With more children, they would have more of a choice about who to leave as head of the family in their place.  
  
And they needed to do it _right,_ so that Draco’s peers would believe in the need to do this, to change things, instead of shoving themselves away from the idea and then letting Mudbloods outbreed them.  
  
Draco stood, staring down at the notes with his fists clenched.  
  
He still didn’t know if they were all true. He didn’t know if he would, in the end, give Potter all the credit, or claim it for himself. But for the moment, he couldn’t disprove them, and the needs of his kind outweighed his own.  
  
*  
  
This time, Harry thought as he reached for his glasses, fingers fumbling in the light cast by his fire, he had a reason to be _legitimately_ irritated, since whoever was calling him had woken him up in the middle of the night, instead of the afternoon.  
  
He blinked when he saw Malfoy’s face in the flames. He had instinctively thought that Malfoy was the sort of person who went to bed with the sun, so as to keep his shiny hair and perfect eyes intact.  
  
“Malfoy?” he asked, around a yawn. “What is it?”  
  
“I think that I know ways I can propagate this theory, and get people to believe it, and change their behavior towards house-elves,” Malfoy said, without a pause, so that Harry’s brain still foundered on the fact of him having decided Harry was right before he listened to what he had said about their tactics. “If you’ll put _me_ in charge of the public relations, instead of insisting you have to be because you’re Harry Potter.”  
  
Harry blinked, then smiled. “Anything that’ll reduce the attention I get is a good fit for me,” he said. “Though Hermione might fight you for the position you want.” He leaned forwards, aware that his heart was beating fast and there was a sharp taste in his mouth. “We’re agreed on this, then?”  
  
“If I find a better theory, I’ll support it,” Malfoy said flatly. “But yes, for the moment, I can accept this.” He met Harry’s eye, and gave him a smile that was stuck somewhere between a grin and a sneer. “We’re going to change things, Potter.”  
  
 _This is it, Rose,_ Harry thought as he grinned back. _This is what I needed to break me free._


	7. Designing the Attack

  
“You haven’t thought about this at _all_ , have you, Potter?”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes, but didn’t look up from the parchment in front of him, where he’d started writing down the list of pure-blood families who had suffered some sort of problem with their children in this generation. Those would be the people they most needed to convince, and the ones, especially the ones like the Longbottoms, Harry thought, who were personal friends, that should know first. “What do you mean?”  
  
“These strategies.” There was a rattling, rustling noise as Malfoy slapped down the parchments on the counter in front of him and stalked closer to Harry, who was sitting at the kitchen table. “You can’t honestly think that most of them will _work_ on the pure-bloods.”  
  
Harry sighed and leaned back, wincing a little as the charms on his leg loosened and made it ache. Prop it up in the one position where his knee wouldn’t hurt and the muscles tended to stiffen and bother him later. At least, they did when he was sitting in the same position for as long as he’d been sitting in this one. “Well, that’s why I have you, don’t I? To tell me what doesn’t work and plan out something that will.”  
  
Malfoy jerked his head up, eyes seeking Harry’s, but Harry looked back and said nothing. It was true. No matter how long Malfoy looked at him, it wouldn’t become less true, and Harry wondered idly what he thought he would accomplish by his staring.  
  
Finally, Malfoy sniffed and shook his head, laying down the parchment he was still holding on the table. “Fine. Then one of the first of my _strategies_ is that you should do something about that.” He gestured at Harry.  
  
Harry looked down, thinking he meant the Weasley jumper. “No,” he said peacefully. “I’ll dress the way I want to in my own home.”  
  
“Not _that_ ,” Malfoy said, and his hand darted down towards what he could see of Harry’s leg sticking out from under the table.  
  
Harry didn’t even think, he just reacted. His wand was up, serpent-quick, and pointing at the base of Malfoy’s throat. Malfoy froze, and Harry, breathing carefully, wondered if maybe he wasn’t the only one who still had reflexes left over from the war.  
  
Malfoy cleared his throat a moment later and turned his head to the side, as if there had never been a confrontation. “If you don’t want to walk again, then tell me why,” he said.  
  
“I’ve been to the best Healers in St. Mungo’s already,” Harry said, lowering his wand but resting it on the tabletop again, where he could reach it easily. “And the best Healers in private practice that I could find, too. I even went to see a few people in other countries, at Hermione’s insistence. None of them could do anything. And everyone knows about the wound, anyway. It’s one of the few things that tends to convince people I’m harmless. If I suddenly got rid of it, more people would be inclined to distrust us.”  
  
He expected Malfoy to agree about the commonsense nature of that objection, since he reduced everything else to strategy already, but instead, Malfoy turned his head and stared intently at Harry. “What happened, that they couldn’t fix it?” he breathed.  
  
Harry was about to retort that he was sure Malfoy recalled the details from the newspaper stories, so Harry didn’t have to share, but then he paused. What reason did _Malfoy_ have to follow the news of him, really? It was one thing to outcompete him or sneer automatically at him when they met because of their sons, but they’d ignored each other for the most part since the war, and Harry’s injury couldn’t have been important to him.  
  
“A group of warlocks tortured me for a week,” he said.  
  
Malfoy frowned and looked at his face as if to check for the presence of other scar tissue. Harry shook his head. “Only there,” he said, and shuddered a little. He didn’t like thinking about it. Then again, thanks to the war, there were plenty of other things he didn’t like thinking about, either, and he’d learned to survive having to do so. “Wrenched it back and forth and to the side and up. The joint, I mean. There was nothing the Healers could do by the time I was rescued.”  
  
Malfoy stared at him, and said nothing. Harry looked back, and wondered whether he would say something that would let them get on with their research on strategies to break the news to pure-bloods, or not.  
  
*  
  
Draco wanted to vomit. Or punch Potter. Potter sat there and talked about that as though—as though it didn’t matter. But of course it always did, torture always mattered. Draco could remember every single piece of torture he’d inflicted at the Dark Lord’s command, and most of them had been easier than what Potter went through.  
  
Or quicker, at least. Draco reminded himself that he couldn’t really know if suffering through the Cruciatus Curse was _easier,_ in comparison. Out of the two sensations, he’d only experienced one of them.  
  
“Then we have practical considerations to think of,” he said. “How easily can you stand on it?”  
  
“Do you want me to fall over in front of our audience?” Potter asked dryly. “Or be too high on Calming Draught and Cheering Charms to form a coherent sentence? I’ll have to sit.”  
  
“I’ve seen you walk,” Draco said. It was obvious his house-elf didn’t like it, but Potter had only smiled kindly at the creature as he walked down to the kitchen. Maybe _that_ was the reason he had three children who had all grown up healthy, if his theory was correct.  
  
 _Although doing something a house-elf doesn’t want you to and refusing his help could still count as cruel treatment by some standards._  
  
Potter nodded. “For a few minutes at a time. Even then, if I walk too fast or hit my knee on something? It’s all I can do to stay conscious from the pain, sometimes.” Draco looked at him suspiciously, but he didn’t talk like someone full of self-pity. Potter turned back to the list of names in front of him. “How do you think we should break the news to the pure-bloods?”  
  
Draco waited a little more, and still there was no self-pity. He took the chair across from Potter, and renewed the Cleaning Charms that kept him from actual contact with the tainted wood. “Gently. How else?”  
  
Potter snorted. “No shit,” he said, and Draco opened his mouth and then closed it again, because scolding Potter for language wouldn’t improve relations between them. “What should we say first? Who to?”  
  
“We need a public appearance,” Draco said firmly. “I know that you probably want to break it to your little friend Longbottom first—” He broke off, because Potter was grinning at him. “What?” he demanded irritably.  
  
“If you think Neville is _little_ now,” Potter said, “wait until you see him.”  
  
Draco waved an equally irritable hand. “Anyway. We need the public appearance, because that way, no one can accuse us of only telling certain people first, and making things up. Oh, it’ll be an accusation anyway, but this way, we can hold back that particular one based on favoritism. The only things we need to decide on are the venue and who we should invite to cover the story. I know that Rita Skeeter would probably want to, but it should be someone else who works for the _Daily Prophet._ ”  
  
“Which leaves us with a limited choice,” Potter muttered, shutting his eyes and leaning back a few inches, probably all he _could_ lean back with his leg propped out in front of him like another part of the chair.  
  
Draco watched him with half-lidded eyes and said nothing. Potter could think, when he put his mind to it. His notes were proof. The problem was that he too often wanted other people to think for him, a habit he’d probably picked up at Hogwarts when the Mudblood did all his homework for him.  
  
“Rosemary Dibs,” Potter said at last, when he’d thought for so long that Draco decided he would see steam rising from his head soon. “She’s the most neutral in the blood prejudice wars, and she’s not especially hostile to me, because she’s never wanted a personal interview.”  
  
Draco nodded shortly. It was the choice he would have made. Rosemary Dibs was half-blood, but her mother was pure, and she walked a narrow, neutral line between the two halves of her heritage, and she had been a Slytherin. “Let _me_ compose the letter we send her. It has to offer the invitation in exactly the right way.”  
  
Potter’s eyes flashed open, and he smiled at Draco with an equal flash of teeth. “Gladly. In fact, I’m planning to let you write all the letters with the exceptions of the ones to the Longbottoms and the Bones.”  
  
“A good division of labor,” Draco said, shaking his head and standing. “Leave all the real work up to the pure-bloods, as usual.”  
  
Potter looked as if he might protest, but then snorted instead. Draco tracked the trail of small drops of mucus across the kitchen, and Vanished them when they landed. “Fine. If you want to look at it that way.” He murmured a _Finite_ at his leg, and then stood, limping, with his hand on the back of the chair. “In the meantime, I’ll explain to Hermione what my research entails and that you’re helping.”  
  
“I am,” Draco said, in a careful, glacial tone, “persuaded that you have the harder task. In this one instance.”  
  
Potter snorted again, but this time, Draco didn’t see the mucus. He stumped away into the room that Draco thought must be the library, or one of the libraries, from the books on the walls, and Draco turned to the writing of the letters. The one to Dibs first.  
  
*  
  
Harry was smiling when the Floo connection opened in Ron and Hermione’s house, but neither Ron nor Hermione answered his firecall, although it was Saturday morning and he could usually count on one of them being home.  
  
Instead, it was the only face he dreaded in Hermione’s family, and the only one of his nephews or nieces he had ever fought with.  
  
“Hugo,” he said stiffly, and then waited to see if the still face Hugo turned towards him would show as much response.  
  
Hugo took a few deep, sharp breaths, and his hands opened and closed. He had red hair and brown eyes, like Lily, but the resemblance stopped there. While Lily was growing up looking like Ginny, Hugo looked like his father, but without having realized yet that being strong didn’t all have to do with your body.  
  
“Uncle _Harry_ ,” Hugo said at last. “Are you sitting down?”  
  
Harry winced in spite of himself, not so much from the words, but from the tone, which ran up and down his body like someone scraping with a razor. “You know I am, Hugo,” he said quietly. “I have a hard time kneeling anymore, since—”  
  
“But you _could_ ,” Hugo interrupted, and his voice was dull and pounding now. “You _could_. If you tried. If you forced yourself. If you fought. Instead of just giving up and collapsing back into your body like it’s a _sack_.”  
  
Harry shook his head. Half the time, he thought, Hugo didn’t even listen to the specifics of what he was saying. He just rattled things off and tried to press his rage and disappointment into Harry, who refused to accept it.  
  
“This injury is never going to heal,” he said. “And it’s not what I called about, anyway. Is your mum home?”  
  
“You could have,” Hugo whispered. “Mum told me. There was that one Healer in Ireland who said that you could walk again if you just tried his methods.”  
  
“He wanted to cut off my leg and drain half my magic,” Harry said. “And even then, he didn’t promise that he could do anything.” A moment later, he stopped and bit his lip. Arguing with Hugo never did any good, because he didn’t argue, he just shouted. Harry should have been the better person, because he was the adult, and not let himself be drawn in.  
  
“Is your Mum home?” he asked again.  
  
Hugo stared at him with dry, red eyes. Harry just looked back at him. That was the danger of hero-worship, he thought. He’d been Hugo’s hero, and Hugo couldn’t accept how much he’d changed.  
  
“You could have walked again,” Hugo whispered. “You didn’t _want_ to. And that means that—that people out there are dying who you could have saved, they’re dying, and they’re never going to forgive you. And neither am I.”  
  
He turned and bolted away from the fireplace, and Harry knew Hermione was coming. He would have to talk in just the right way to her, to explain why he had told Malfoy about the research before he’d told her, and to persuade her that they really did need Malfoy and the expertise he had with pure-blood things.  
  
But for a moment, just a moment, before she got there, he let himself shut his eyes and wince.  
  
*  
  
Draco told himself he could _too_ be in the same room as a Mudblood and not strike out. His father had done this several times, when he’d met with high Ministry officials who he’d had to talk to or bribe, and he hadn’t done anything unbefitting a Malfoy. Draco, though falling short of his father’s ideal in so many other ways, could do this much.  
  
Granger swept into the room and stared at him. She had her hands on her hips and her hair hanging loose around her face in an unattractive fashion that made Draco abruptly long to see Astoria, just so he could position her next to the Mudblood as a contrast. But she wasn’t there, and Granger was, so Draco nodded stiffly and started to open his mouth.  
  
Granger beat him to it. She was always _doing_ things like that, Draco thought, ducking his head so she couldn’t see the emotion in his eyes. “Harry tells me that he put you in charge of this research and proving it wrong. You couldn’t, could you?”  
  
Her tone, far more than her words, made Draco want to blaze with rage. But he didn’t do that around his son, and he was infinitely more worth getting upset about, now that he had turned his back on his heritage. So all Draco said was, “ _Harry_ has the makings of a competent magical researcher, yes.”  
  
Granger made a disgusted noise and shook her head. “You can’t even admit now that we might be better at you than something, can you?” she asked, and drummed one hand on the table. Draco waited to catch his notes in case she disturbed them, but she didn’t. He did cast Cleaning Charms with his wand down at his side where she couldn’t see it, though, in order to keep her contamination from getting on his parchments. “You’re going to go on holding pure-bloods up as better, the way you’ve always done—”  
  
“We _are_ better,” Draco said, and managed one of the better bored stares of his lifetime. “The proof is in the name. What’s pure is better than what’s mixed, stained, _muddy_ —”  
  
“What’s mixed,” Granger said, and her voice edged towards the shrillness that Draco had been sure would come sooner or later, because Mudbloods resembled parrots as much as they did any other animal, “is often _stronger_ than its parents. It’s called _hybrid vigor,_ Malfoy. They can survive diseases that their parents can’t, they can breed in ways that their parents can’t, they’ll have all sorts of advantages. You can’t stand that your breed is the dying one and that mine is the one that will survive, can you?”  
  
Draco smiled and opened his mouth to answer, and Potter stepped between them.  
  
Well, considering his leg, it was more like he limped between them, and he was holding onto the back of his chair and breathing noisily, but he was there, and his eyes were enough like his eyes on the day he had killed the Dark Lord to make Draco take a step backwards.  
  
“I know your children, Hermione,” Potter said, quietly and clearly. “And I know Malfoy’s son. _Neither_ of them are worth despising. And both of them could be affected by this if they want to have children with pure-bloods. And nobody, whatever they’ve done, deserves to watch their children die, or suffer miscarriage after miscarriage. We’re doing this for the pure- bloods on the surface, but everyone underneath. Including the house-elves. It’s going to make _everyone’s_ lives better, and you can’t argue about that. All right?”  
  
“You heard what he was saying, Harry!” Granger pointed one shaking finger at Draco. “He hasn’t changed _at all!_ ”  
  
“I’m pleased to say that I haven’t.” Draco raised his upper lip. “I’m pleased to say that I have _some_ standards—”  
  
Potter turned to face him, and Draco’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth this time.   
  
“I’m calling in the life-debt that you owe me for saving you in the Room of Requirement, Malfoy,” he said flatly. “You’re going to work with me and Hermione to get the truth out there, and persuade them of it. I won’t ask you to change what you think. I can’t. But I’m going to tell you to watch what you _say_. Don’t call Hermione or anyone else that name. We can’t afford less than a united front.”  
  
Draco stared at Potter for a long, silent moment, ignoring the way Granger flailed behind him. He—  
  
He hadn’t known that Potter would do something so pure-blood, something so formal. It was the only way Draco could accede to his request without feeling that he was betraying his heritage.   
  
After a moment, he inclined his head and said, “Of course. I’ll work with Granger, because this issue concerns my kind, too.”  
  
“His _kind_ ,” Granger sneered. “Harry, he still thinks of us as completely separate species, how can you—”  
  
Potter turned his head and looked at Granger, and she shut up, too, although Potter didn’t say anything. Then she nodded.  
  
“It’ll benefit house-elves,” she said, as if trying out the argument in front of a crowd.  
  
Potter smiled at her, or at least Draco thought so from what he could see of Potter’s profile, and then slumped into his chair and leaned back. His leg trembled and shook all over. Granger clucked over him and fetched his house-elf and ice and a hot cloth, while Potter just accepted what she handed him, shrugging or shaking his head now and then.  
  
Draco, secure in his honor, and with an odd contentment humming in his blood, went back to writing the letters.


	8. The Flight of the Letters

  
Draco smiled as the owl deposited the letter in his hand. It was an owl of the same sort that delivered the _Daily Prophet_ every day, brown and ordinary but marked by powerful wings and talons. Draco knew who it was from, and he took his time opening the envelope so he could take a long, luxurious sip of his tea beforehand.  
  
 _Dear Mr. Malfoy,  
  
What you have to say sounds most interesting. As long as the time and day do not change, I can be at the doorstep of Mr. Potter’s house on the seventh at four to cover it._  
  
 _Your servant,  
Rosemary Dibs._  
  
Draco rolled his eyes at the closing signature, and then shrugged. Dibs had made her way in the newspaper with that kind of caution; she was the one who printed her stories last, but full of the kinds of facts that would make her audience sit up and take notice, because she had spent time researching and found the most interesting or exciting or sensational news. It was none of Draco’s business if Dibs wanted to lie on her way to greatness.  
  
He set the letter aside, wondering idly as he did so if Potter had received any reply to his Longbottom letter.  
  
*  
  
“This is really true?”  
  
Harry felt his face soften as he looked at Neville. His friend was leaning through the Floo as if he was going to change his mind about just making a firecall and visit Harry right then and there. His hand shook on the letter Harry had written him, and he was swallowing again and again, swiping at his lips with the back of his hand.  
  
“Yes, it is,” Harry said. “As far as we can determine,” he had to add next. “If there’s something else that would explain the pure-blood pattern of not having children as well, we haven’t found it yet.”  
  
From the look on Neville’s face, he’d only heard the first part of what Harry said. He was turning the letter over and over in his hand again, his mouth still slightly open. Harry understood. The words were one thing, one kind of promise, but they weren’t something that Neville could touch and hold the way he could the letter.  
  
“When and where is this conference you mentioned going to be held?” Neville asked softly then, looking up.  
  
Harry leaned back in his chair and carefully levered his leg into a new position; his knee was bothering him that morning. “At four on the seventh, in front of my house,” he said.  
  
Neville thought about it for a second, and then nodded. “I should be able to get away. My seventh-years need a few lessons on their own with the Devil’s Snare, anyway.”  
  
Harry traded a smile with Neville, and then the fireplace went dark. Harry turned to the list of pure-blood names and crossed off the Longbottoms. Malfoy had owled him that afternoon to tell him Dibs would be the reporter. That left…a lot of people to go, really, but their letters would all go to Malfoy anyway.  
  
Harry put down the quill and leaned back in his chair, willing his heart to stop leaping and bounding so fast. But the grin remained on his face, despite the fact that this really wasn’t a _happy_ discovery and he knew some people would hate him for it. That didn’t matter. Things were moving. They were on their way.  
  
He was _alive_ again.  
  
*  
  
Draco stepped out of the Apparition point and nearly collided with a fat wizard in a yellow jumper whom he didn’t recognize. He stepped back with a murmured apology and watched the wizard tug his black-clad wife and a single child along by the hands. There was a set to his face that Draco had become used to seeing in his fireplace over the past week.  
  
Anticipation and urgency, both at once. These were pure-bloods who were anxious to learn why they might not have had more than one child, but at the same time, they were more than a little apprehensive about what they might have to change.  
  
Draco smiled, and lifted his head. He could feel something like blood, something like joy, dancing through his veins. It connected him to the crowd forming and eddying in front of Potter’s house, and made him breathe more deeply and walk with his head held high. He knew what they would do next, what they wanted, what they suspected, what they feared.  
  
And he knew what to do about it, how to make them react and run in one direction with a simple crack of the whip. It was a wonderful feeling, to know what they would do and how to make them do it.  
  
He was the expert here. Not the expert on public relations that Granger fancied herself as, or the expert on house-elves that, again, Granger would claim to be, but the expert on how his own kind moved and breathed and thought.  
  
Potter and Granger would do nothing successful without him.  
  
 _That was what I wanted,_ he thought in wonder as he moved and flowed with the crowd towards the doorstep where Potter was preparing to give the wizarding world a brand new problem. _Something to do, something to get me out of the house. It’s all very well designing new theoretical potions, but how many people ever read the journals? How many even of the ones who do can give me good competition? I need stronger enemies, more rush and pull and push and risk._  
  
Now he would have them.  
  
He reached the far edge of the crowd, which surrounded the rows of chairs Potter and Granger had placed out, and made his way towards the front of it and the platform where Potter and Granger sat. Granger, he was pleased to see, had made an effort, wearing black button-up dress robes with white lace edging on the cuffs. A conservative outfit for a witch about to make a revolutionary announcement. It was the best mixture of both worlds that Draco could imagine.  
  
Potter, though…Draco narrowed his eyes. His clothes weren’t scruffy, like the ones he wore inside his house, but they weren’t dress robes, either. They were plain black trousers, and a black shirt on top of that. Nothing horrible, but not conservative in the way that Granger’s clothes were.  
  
Perhaps that was for the best, Draco admitted slowly to himself as he climbed the makeshift stone stage Granger had Transfigured the doorstep into to stand beside them. Potter was widely-known for not wearing dress robes, and to change things now, just like standing, would be to encourage people not to trust him.  
  
And Potter didn’t look as though he took this less than seriously. And wearing dress robes, it might have been painful for him to support his leg.  
  
Draco scowled, and used that expression to greet both Granger’s equal scowl and Potter’s smile in his direction. He hated being forced to acknowledge that maybe his enemies had a point.  
  
 _Except that those wizards out there are more likely to become your enemies,_ he thought, as he turned and took his chair facing the crowd. The silent men and women staring at him, watching, pressing their children close to them and looking back and forth between their three faces as though wondering what could bring these three notorious people together.  
  
Granger stood up, smiling. She made a speech that Draco knew few people listened to. Most of those in the crowd wouldn’t listen to her because of her heritage, and the rest would get lost in the platitudes.  
  
No, they were waiting to hear the truth. And the best way to present that truth was fast and fierce and uncompromising. Draco felt the words forming in his head, and he leaned back and sipped at the glass of water Potter’s house-elf, who had a fondness for him, had placed in front of him on the table as he waited.  
  
*  
  
They didn’t have enough chairs for everybody.  
  
Harry thought that made some sense, on one level. Even people they hadn’t contacted themselves would hear rumors of this, and of course they would want to make sure that they didn’t miss out. And they would bring members of their families who might be concerned, too. It made sense that they wouldn’t be able to predict how many people would show up.  
  
But he still found himself freezing when he looked at the ocean of faces beneath him. He hadn’t seen these many people since he was hurt—  
  
Then he clamped control of himself down over his body, which wanted to storm and scream and run away in panic. No, that was not going to happen. For one thing, he would look silly flopping on the stage like a stranded fish.  
  
That made him loosen the panic in his throat, and actually listen to Hermione’s welcome speech, which so far was being greeted with stern faces from beneath them and little applause.  
  
“—relates to the intimate circumstances of our lives.” Hermione had agreed not to talk about house-elves until Harry and Malfoy had a chance to do so, mainly because she wouldn’t _stop_ once she started, but Harry could see how much she wanted to. She worried her lip between her teeth, and spoke more slowly than normal. “And my friend Harry Potter is the one who discovered it.” She turned and held out her hand to Harry.  
  
Harry swallowed back what he instinctively wanted to say to that, and faced his public. He opened his mouth.  
  
He caught his breath back when he felt Malfoy’s hand on his beneath the table. He looked towards him, and Malfoy nodded slightly and whispered, “Let me address them first. If I may,” he added, when Hermione looked at him with her mouth open.  
  
Harry blinked, not sure whether he felt more relief at being granted the reprieve or surprise for the politeness. But he trusted Malfoy in a way that he knew Hermione didn’t. He trusted his commitment to the idea, at least, and the way it would be received among pure-bloods.  
  
And maybe Malfoy even felt some of the same desire he did, the desire to get this knowledge spread so that wizards could stop hurting their own chances of having children.  
  
Harry leaned back and nodded to Malfoy. Malfoy stood up and stepped around the table, holding the eyes of those in the crowd. Harry followed his gaze and saw some people relaxing, as though they were hot and Malfoy was the cooling breeze that would soothe them. Harry raised his eyebrows. _He was right. They’ll listen more easily to someone they think is a pure-blood like them._  
  
“My name is Draco Malfoy,” Malfoy said, and Harry knew as if it had been whispered in his ear that he wasn’t doing that because he was afraid that people in the crowd didn’t recognize him. It was a shared bond between them, a way of giving family credentials and proving to them that he had a stake in this, too. “I have a single son. In my case, my wife did not wish to bear more, and we were lucky enough to have an heir within a year of getting married.  
  
“But many of you—many of you have no choice.” Malfoy lowered his voice and took a step towards the edge of the stage. “Some of you have lost multiple children in the womb, or at birth. Some of you have children who cannot participate in your heritage.” That was as close as he would come to the word “Squib,” Harry thought, which, surprisingly, both Malfoy and Hermione had agreed they should avoid. “Some of you simply have not had the children you wanted, despite the best spells and the best Healers.” He paused.  
  
There were heads in the crowd nodding now, and downcast faces, and staring ones. Not everyone was reacting in the same way, Harry thought, but at least the reactions seemed mainly to favor their cause at the moment.  
  
“Some of you,” Malfoy went on, and his voice was gaining strength, “will have sought the answer in Dark magic. Some in books. Some in ancient historical records, and the Ministry’s Archives. But the answer is closer to home, in our houses themselves.”  
  
A few people looked faintly sick. Harry was sure they were thinking of something environmental, something about the bricks or walls or floors of their houses that they could have made safe for their children if they had only known.  
  
“And for the answer to that dilemma,” Malfoy said, and moved a step back, “I give you the one who discovered it.”  
  
He spread his hand to Harry, in a gesture so near Hermione’s that Harry blinked. Then he sighed. So Malfoy wasn’t going to try claim credit for his research? Harry licked his lips and tried to calm his churning stomach. It would have been one solution.  
  
 _But not the best one,_ he reminded himself as he turned outwards and faced the crowd again. He had always hated public speaking, but sometimes one had to. Just the same way that he’d had to kill Voldemort and fight in the war.  
  
And this was a war he wanted to fight far more than that one ever had been.  
  
“Hello,” he began. “You know who I am.”  
  
*  
  
Draco restrained the urge to roll his eyes, or to shout that they did indeed know who Harry fucking Potter was, but why didn’t he tell them again, just for taste?  
  
Instead, he leaned back and watched Potter, watched the way he handled the crowd, and paid more attention to that than the words. They knew what he would say. While Draco could improvise, and Granger could and would deliver her plans word-perfect no matter what the crowd would listen to, Potter fell somewhere in between them. He had discussed his ideas to death with them, but not his words.  
  
Now, he spoke quietly, with the _Sonorus_ Charm rather than a shout carrying his voice to all parts of the crowd. Dibs, in the front row, listened to him silently except for the rasp of her quill. Most of the rest fell silent, too, as they listened to Potter speak about the covenant and the kinship between magical creatures and magical humans, and how, in the future and the past both, changes should be made.  
  
They listened until Potter said, “And the closest relationship we have is with house-elves. The research I’ve done has shown that, in past ages when the people who owned them treated house-elves kindly, they achieved larger families. When they treated them badly—”  
  
“It’s always been left up to individual families to treat house-elves as they will,” Dibs said quietly, looking up from her notes. “Are you proposing to change that, Mr. Potter?”  
  
Draco narrowed his eyes. It wasn’t like Dibs to interrupt when someone was talking. She was known for her politeness and her ability to coax a story out of someone foaming at the mouth by simply standing up to them.  
  
 _Unless she’s doing it as a test. Or a way to make sure that she gets_ this _story before the shouting starts._  
  
“I can’t force anyone to do anything,” Potter said, and gave her that big smile that seemed to belong to a village idiot rather than the destroyer of the Dark Lord. “But I rather think that some families might value their ability to have children more than their ability to clip house-elves’ ears or hang their heads on the wall after they die.”  
  
Dibs smiled and sat back, her quill tapping against her parchment. Draco was sure that she had got what she wanted, one way or another.  
  
“We can’t—we can’t change things like that,” said a tall woman in the middle of the crowd, who Draco knew from her face must be a scion of the Highfeathers. “You can’t tell us to.”  
  
Potter raised a hand. “As I said, I can’t force anyone.”  
  
 _And that’s the problem, and the reason that you’re so effective,_ Draco thought to him. _You could if you wanted to. If anyone could, it’s you. If your power and your reputation and your debts were laid side-by-side, you would have the power to force anyone to do anything you liked. They’re wary of you, and they don’t understand why you hold back._  
  
 _I think I’m starting to, a little bit._  
  
“We _can’t_ change anything,” repeated the woman, and folded her arms. Draco thought it made her look ridiculous when her opponent was a seated invalid, unless one had seen the scar on that particular invalid’s forehead. “That would destroy the way we are, if we start bowing to the whims of an individual.”  
  
“I don’t ask you to,” Potter said, and his voice rang with an echo that might have been irritation, for a moment. He dismissed the emotion with one shake of his shaggy head, though. “But I do ask you to look at the evidence, and see if you can see your way clear to changing things. If not with house-elves, with other magical creatures. The way you think of them. The way you act with them. Reach out to centaurs, or stop hunting unicorns, or contribute to a dragon sanctuary. That worked, with some wizards in the past.”  
  
“We _can’t_ change,” the Highfeather woman repeated flatly, and then she turned and shoved her way out of the crowd.  
  
Draco counted the ones who followed. Two families, four, six. And then no one else. The rest of the people pressed closer to the stage, staring at Potter as if he could put his body between them and this threat the way he had between them and the Dark Lord.  
  
“How do you know that it’s the way we treat house-elves, and not something else?” the yellow-jumper wizard Draco had seen on his way here shouted.  
  
That seemed to be the cute for more questions, and they poured their way over Potter like a tide from the sea. But he waved to Granger to collect them, and she moved forwards and started answering one at a time, using a charm that made her voice quiet and steady and impossibly hard to outshout, simply prone to be heard.  
  
Potter leaned back with his hands behind his head and turned his face from side to side, seeming to count faces, directions, angles, enemies, the ways people were looking at him. He looked far brighter, more alert, than any of the times that Draco had seen him so far.  
  
Then his eyes found Draco’s, and he smiled, his face falling apart into light.  
  
Draco smiled back before he thought about it, and then it seemed best to let the expression remain. It was only one. And it would make a good show for the crowd.  
  
 _I must think that way._


	9. This Work

  
Harry sank gratefully into the chair at the kitchen table. He probably would have felt a bit better upstairs, but he couldn’t face the steps right now, his leg ached so abominably. And he wouldn’t go and sit in the study when Malfoy was with him. There were things there he would sneer at.  
  
“Wow,” Hermione said, closing the front door, from the sound of it, and heading for the kitchen.  
  
Harry couldn’t tell what she felt about the meeting from that particular word, so he leaned his head back in the chair and raised his eyebrows at her as she came around the corner.  
  
“I never expected to meet so many prejudiced people in my _life_ ,” Hermione said, and sat down with a bump in the chair that faced Harry.  
  
“From their point of view, you are equally prejudiced, and want them to give up things that they wouldn’t have dreamed they needed to surrender,” Malfoy said over his shoulder. He was preparing the tea, and since Kreacher was there to watch him and help, Harry had let him go ahead with doing it. He wondered _why_ Malfoy wanted to do it when they had a house-elf, but perhaps he wanted his cup specially prepared or something. “I think we’re lucky to have come out of it with as few insults as we did.”  
  
“Only one group of people in the wizarding world tried to kill me,” Hermione said, with a dangerous peacefulness in her tone that Harry recognized. Sometimes it showed up right before she erupted in yelling at him or Ron, too. “Only one group would have happily snapped my wand and said that I had stolen my magic from some pure-blood.”  
  
“That’s right,” Harry said, Summoning one of the pain potions that he kept in the cupboard on the far side of the kitchen. Malfoy twitched as the door opened and the vial zoomed out and into Harry’s hand. Harry wondered if it irritated him to see potions treated so cavalierly. “The Death Eaters.”  
  
Malfoy made a sound that might have been a choke, and his shoulders shook. Hermione stared at Harry, her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to prove something, Harry?” she asked.  
  
Harry looked at her, and smiled, and shook his head innocently. “Prove something? Me? Not really, Hermione.”  
  
He left her to puzzle over what he had meant instead—not that that would take long, Hermione was a brilliant witch—and turned to Malfoy. “How many do you think we managed to convince?”  
  
Malfoy busied himself with the tea until Hermione shifted impatiently in her seat, which Harry was sure was what Malfoy had been waiting for. Then he turned and came to the table with the tea, steaming in what seemed to be identical cups. Harry eyed them, then shrugged. Malfoy could still do what he wanted as long as he didn’t try to poison someone, and Harry thought he wouldn’t. They were too convenient.  
  
Malfoy slid a cup over in front of Harry first, tilting his head at the potions vial. “You should eat something before you take that, Potter.”  
  
“He _knows_ that,” Hermione hissed, instantly. “How long do you think he’s been taking those potions?”  
  
“Not long enough, if his face still gets as pale as that.” Malfoy took his own seat, his expression curiously inflexible. He locked his eyes on Harry and took a sip of his tea. Only then did Hermione take one, and Harry saw her wand moving, performing charms over the cup.  
  
He started to turn to her and shake his head warningly, but Malfoy cleared his throat, commanding Harry’s attention. “We didn’t convince many of them,” he said. “But we made them doubt, and with some of them, that’s better, sometimes. Why do you take that potion on an empty stomach, Potter?”  
  
“I can tolerate it that way,” Harry explained, taking the cork out of the vial. “When I take it with food, it just makes me throw up.” He gulped the thick, murky liquid, grimacing as he thought he felt leaves and larger things brush the sides of his throat. But it was a price that had to be paid, and a moment later, the throbbing pain from his knee eased.  
  
“And you’re not addicted?” Malfoy was watching Harry with the most normal expression Harry had ever seen him use. Harry reminded himself to remember that it existed when Malfoy was being a real pain in the arse.  
  
He shook his head. “My reactions to it aren’t normal in any sense of the word. I can take it on an empty stomach, I don’t get addicted—I’ll accept it.” He put the empty vial in the center of the table and sipped his tea, just a bit. Liquids usually mixed all right with the potion, but sometimes not. “Which ones do you think are the most likely to doubt? Should we try to contact them and enlist them as allies?”  
  
Malfoy flicked his eyebrows up, and the normal expression became a neutral one. “Strategy, Potter? What is the world coming to?”  
  
“That much I know,” Harry said, and found himself almost grinning. Some things were predictable. His knee would always hurt, his reaction to pain potions would always be strange, and Malfoy would always disparage his intelligence. Harry could count on that, and anything that made Malfoy more predictable would also make him easier to work with. “But I don’t know if speaking to them separately would make them back off in suspicion or convince them to come closer, at this point. That’s what we have you for.” He tilted his teacup at Malfoy.  
  
Malfoy gave him the weirdest look at that, weirder than the normal one a little while ago had been. Harry sipped at his tea again, more strongly this time as his stomach stayed settled, and wondered what Malfoy was thinking.  
  
*  
  
 _He’s…taking me seriously?_  
  
Draco hadn’t taken it into much consideration when Potter stepped in the way of Granger’s anti-pure-blood rhetoric earlier. Potter wanted a cordial working relationship as much as the rest of them did, and it would probably suit him best if neither Draco nor Granger said something that called for action.  
  
But this was something more. And Potter hadn’t made jokes about the poisoned tea, and he had said something that made good sense, and he had yielded to the expertise about pure-bloods that Draco had seen himself as bringing to the table but hadn’t known that anyone else would acknowledge.  
  
Draco cleared his throat, excruciatingly aware that his father would never have been caught this far off-guard, and nodded. “Either could happen. I would recommend speaking to the ones that you can trust first, Longbottom and Bones.” He paused, and then added, “And Alicia Highfeather.”  
  
“The woman who stormed away before the debate began?” Granger leaned across the table and tapped her fingers on the top of it. She looked as though she would much rather that her fingers were making a fist and punching Draco’s nose in. “What’s the purpose? She wasn’t there to hear the conversation. She can’t understand anything of the context.”  
  
Draco smirked at her. So wonderful, the feeling almost _physical,_ to know that in this game he knew more than she did. “That’s it. You make the others think that there’s something special to know, so bring them closer. You _impress_ those who can be impressed, with your tolerance. You show that you’re serious about including all pure-bloods under the spread of information, even the ones who have no interest in cooperating. And Highfeather is the sort who will insult you and then feel insulted in turn if you behave with less than perfect graciousness to her. Go after her now, and we stand a chance of making a strong ally of her.”  
  
“I don’t think we should indulge that sort of behavior.” Granger’s cheeks were mottled an ugly combination of red and pink.   
  
“We have to,” Draco said coolly. “We’ll see many things that are worse, and our best chance is to play the more understanding, more tolerant, partner in this conversation. We can’t start shouting and turn away from those who anger us. After all, isn’t our stance that everyone deserves a chance to know the truth and change their behavior, even those who hate us? We’ll damage that, and our reputation in the eyes of judges like Dibs, if we spitefully cut people off.”  
  
Granger looked as though she didn’t know which insult to hurl first, but Potter reached across the table and touched her hand. Draco wondered if he was the only one who noticed Potter’s slight grimace when his leg slipped with the movement. “Hermione,” Potter said softly. “He’s right. Remember that Thomas Occult case?”  
  
Granger’s mouth tightened, and she looked away. Draco did a quick rifle through his memory, found nothing that matched the name, and decided that high-handed condescension was his best bet. “What are you talking about, Potter?”  
  
“Someone mental calling himself Thomas Occult,” Potter said, turning to face him. “He kept practicing spells that weren’t _quite_ illegal, but related to the Dark Arts and the Unforgivable Curses. And he kept daring the Ministry to make a martyr of him by putting him in Azkaban. He also kept challenging me to a duel.”  
  
“You didn’t want to go, of course,” Draco said, remembering how rare Potter’s public appearances had been when he could get away with it. It seemed he spent more time testifying for cases or escorting criminals around than doing anything he _could_ have done with that power and prestige.  
  
 _If I’d had it…_ It was hard to keep his face steady, through the sudden burn of old resentment.  
  
“I didn’t want to go because I knew I could probably destroy him,” Potter said flatly, and his face had a strange expression. Draco had barely managed to recognize it as the one in most of his father’s photographs when Potter continued. “He would use spells that would force me to respond with all of my strength, and that’s—not a good thing. I don’t want to kill people, but some of my instincts do.” He ran his fingers through his hair and looked away for a minute.  
  
Draco opened his mouth to ask a question, such as how many people Potter had killed and why Draco didn’t know more about this when it was _perfectly fascinating,_ but Granger said, probably to prevent Draco ever getting anything he wanted, “And going to duel him would have shown everyone that Harry was taking Occult seriously, but refusing to duel him made it seem that the Ministry was frightened.”  
  
Potter nodded. “Right. So I went out and made a speech about how I would be happy to duel him, but only if we agreed to keep our spells under a certain strength. Because I didn’t want to hurt him, I said. Which was true. But it also meant that he would be sure to lose the duel, because all his expertise was in the strong spells, not the ordinary ones.”  
  
Granger smiled. “That put Occult in the same bind that he’d put Harry in. And in the end, he just stopped bragging about his dueling skills, and the Ministry never heard anything more from him.”  
  
Potter looked at Draco. “We can do the same thing with Highfeather. Of course, it might depend on how good a strategist _she_ is. What do you know about her?”  
  
With the surreal feeling that he was riding a dragon that had just turned sharply to the left, Draco murmured, “What I already said. She dispenses ungraciousness and expects graciousness in return. She sets high store by manners. She loves prestige, and notice. She won’t like your heritage, Potter, but she’ll be sensible to the merits of being noticed by the defeater of the Dark Lord. And you can get away with having less polished manners because Aurors sometimes have to be rough and uncouth.” He nodded at Granger. “Combined with _your_ blood, it would be too much. Potter had better deal with her.”  
  
Granger opened her mouth, but Potter, without looking at her, said, “It’s all right, Hermione. I think Malfoy’s right. We should follow his advice.”  
  
 _He didn’t look at Granger because he was looking at me,_ Draco thought, and his face tingled with something that might have been a blush, except that of course he was too sophisticated to do anything like that. His mouth dried out, and he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.  
  
 _Someone is taking me seriously. Someone treats my opinion of my heritage as valuable, someone who isn’t Scorpius or one of my parents._  
  
 _And that someone is Potter._  
  
Draco warned himself to be careful of his reactions. He wouldn’t want to fall into the trap of thinking Potter _respected_ him, because, plainly, he didn’t.  
  
But it was nice to know that someone thought he could do something other than brew experimental potions. Draco began to work out ways to drop this fact casually into his next conversation with his son.  
  
 _Someone you idolize thinks that I’m right, that I can strategize. He takes pure-bloods seriously. Why don’t you?_  
  
*  
  
It took several more steering attempts to get in between Hermione and Malfoy when one of them wanted to say something that the other one wouldn’t like, but at last the point arrived when they’d split the labor. Hermione agreed to talk to some other people in the Ministry who were half-bloods or Muggleborns who had pure-blood friends, and see what they could do next. Malfoy would approach Highfeather first, with a letter, and then Harry would follow. And Harry would approach Neville and Susan.  
  
Hermione left with a final murmur to Harry about talking to Hugo. Harry smiled at her, and nodded. It wouldn’t do any good, of course, because Hugo was sixteen and had an unusually advanced case of believing his opinion was the only one that mattered, but he was glad that Hermione at least didn’t think he should get away with his shit.  
  
Malfoy stood up slowly from the table, studying Harry intently from beneath his eyelashes, the way he had throughout the latter part of their conversation. Harry nodded back to him, and concealed the sharp twinge he felt from his knee, he hoped. “Thanks for doing this, Malfoy. I’ll firecall you tomorrow.”  
  
He should have remembered that Malfoy had always been good at spotting his weaknesses, and therefore would have seen the twinge. “That pain potion didn’t work,” Malfoy said.  
  
Harry blinked. “Yes, it did. What are you talking about? My knee was in such agony before that I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on strategy without that potion, even my baby version of strategy.”  
  
He thought that would make Malfoy smile. Malfoy just looked intent instead, and prowled around the table. “But the pain isn’t gone.”  
  
Harry shrugged. “It never really is, unless I’m lying in bed and I’m warm enough and I’ve cast the charms just right.”  
  
“That’s not right,” Malfoy said, which Harry didn’t understand until he saw the way Malfoy was staring down at his leg. “A joint, even one tortured the way yours has been, shouldn’t hurt that much, all the time.”  
  
“I’m just special, I suppose,” Harry said dryly. He wanted, badly, to get out of the chair and into a more comfortable position, but he also wanted not to limp and moan in front of Malfoy. If that was pride, well, he still had it. “I can take a more effective potion in a few hours.”  
  
“Which ones do you take?” Malfoy turned to look up at his face.  
  
Harry hesitated, then shrugged again. Malfoy was a professional Potions researcher. He probably wanted to know just to compare it with some of the potions he’d brewed in the past. “The Joint-Easer. A variety of generic ones that I don’t know the names of. Painless. Dreamless Sleep when I can’t sleep for it throbbing.”  
  
Malfoy’s mouth turned sharply down. “It’s a _wonder_ you’re not addicted, Potter,” he said, and his voice made it sound as though Harry had done it to personally annoy him. “I could come up with something better than that regime in my _sleep._ Come on.” He held out his arm commandingly, and moved back from the chair as though he expected Harry to take it.  
  
Harry shook his head. “Walking that way doesn’t work,” he said. “Hopping makes it worse, and so does hobbling, and it’s hard to do anything else when someone’s holding you by the arm and waist that way.”  
  
“What do you do, then?” Malfoy stared at him with silently burning eyes, as though Harry had come up with inadequate ways to travel in order to humiliate him, too.  
  
“Limp,” Harry said, and swung himself out of the chair. The knee didn’t feel as if it was going to freeze and lock when he put his weight on it, which was good. He limped carefully towards the study and the stairs, and Malfoy followed him.  
  
Harry tried, and failed, not to be jealous of the way that Malfoy walked on two good feet. Well. It would pass.   
  
When he turned to face the stairs, Malfoy said, in tones that could have stripped some of the old paper from the walls, “ _Please_ tell me that you at least Lighten and Levitate yourself.”  
  
“I did that, until my muscles started atrophying,” Harry said. “Now I just take them slowly.” He reached out, hooked his arm around the bannister, and hauled his dead weight leg up. Then the good one, most of his weight on the bannister, and then the bad one again, and the good one, and so on. He had to turn to the side to keep his knee from bending as much as possible.  
  
“For Merlin’s _sake_ ,” Malfoy said, far gone in exasperation. “Once won’t kill you. _Levis. Mobilicorpus._ ”  
  
Harry tried not to stiffen as his body washed with lightness and then floated off the ground. For a moment, he thought his knee would collide with the bannister, but Malfoy turned him smoothly and then sent him drifting up the stairs with a gentle shove in the small of his back.  
  
Harry hesitated, and then decided that, all right, once would be okay. He didn’t let Kreacher help because if he did, Kreacher would never _stop,_ and he would have no independence left. And he really had begun to lose the muscle tone in his leg until he forced himself to stop relying on spells.  
  
But sometimes, it was nice to have someone else to help.


	10. Studies in Contrast

  
“Where do you want me to put you?” Malfoy’s voice had a sharp tinge to it as they reached the top of the stairs. Harry wondered if he was growing too heavy for Malfoy’s magic, but, thinking about it, he decided that was unlikely. Perhaps Malfoy simply disliked being uncertain about which way to turn.  
  
“The bedroom is where I keep my pain potions,” Harry said, and waved his hand to indicate the half-open door on the left when Malfoy hesitated.  
  
Malfoy muttered something under his breath, but Harry hadn’t heard it fully and so felt free to ignore it. Well, in truth he would have felt free to ignore it even without that condition, but its existence was convenient.   
  
Harry floated through the door, and made sure to nudge it further open with his good leg so that Malfoy could come in without trouble. Malfoy flicked his wand once, twice, with easy but sharp motions, and settled Harry in the middle of the bed. Harry smiled his thanks and then nodded at the cupboard within easy reach of the bed. “The pain potions I usually take are in there.”   
  
Malfoy stepped up to the cupboard and began to rummage through it. Harry leaned back on the pillows and shut his eyes for a moment, then waved his wand to add another pillow beneath the bad knee. That sometimes helped, not always.  
  
There was the sound of Malfoy pulling corks and sniffing at the mouths of vials. “Why don’t you have them _labeled,_ Potter?” he asked, and Harry heard something bounce with a _ping_ off the side of the cupboard.  
  
Harry opened one lazy eye. “Don’t break anything you can’t _Reparo_ ,” he murmured. “And that’s because I know what all of them are, thanks to their smell and their places in the cupboard. Labeling them just made me feel—helpless, I reckon. Overwhelmed, with all those different names staring at me and knowing that I’d probably have to take them for the rest of my life. This way, I still have the number of the vials to make me feel overwhelmed, but I can tell myself that only some of them are different. The others are all vials of the same potion.”  
  
Malfoy grunted, but said nothing. There was the noise of more rummaging, and then he stepped away from the cupboard and dropped an armful of the largest vials next to Harry’s leg. Harry turned his head and craned his neck to watch Malfoy’s fingers dancing delicately among the glass.  
  
“You won’t have to take them for the rest of your life,” Malfoy said briefly, not looking up. “Even with your ability to evade addiction, there are some of these that you can only take for ten years or so. And I at least _hope_ that you plan to live longer than that.”  
  
Harry blinked at him for a moment, and then waved his hand. “Oh, yeah. Because the fight for the truth will take longer than that. Don’t worry, Malfoy. I don’t plan to rush into danger the way I did when I was younger, so I’ll be around for a while.”  
  
*  
  
Draco ground his teeth on the left side of his mouth, where it was less noticeable than if he did it on both sides at once, and continued sorting through the vials. For a reason that not even he could explain to himself, Potter’s assumption that Draco only cared about the length of his life because of their shared struggle was—  
  
 _Reasonable? The kind of thing that you would have wanted but not expected Potter to say? He’s behaving the way you want him to, but even that irritates you._  
  
Draco did what he often did with the same complicated, paradoxical tangles that he felt around his son, and placed them aside. He sat back with three vials, the generic pain potions Potter had said he was taking, and held them out. Potter leaned back and propped his glasses up on his nose to see them better.  
  
“These are the ones that will only cause trouble in the long run,” Draco said, quietly, forcefully, both wondering who had _not_ explained this to Potter and wondering at his own gratitude that they had not. Of course, he could use this explanation to make Potter more dependent on him now, but he didn’t think he needed to in order for Potter to continue as his faithful ally. “They are not only addictive, but dangerous. They suppress the pain. They do not heal or help the injury. They make you think that you can maintain an effort—such as walking—that you cannot, and you will pay the price later.”  
  
Potter blinked, then said, “You’re right. I’ve noticed that effect when I take them. I mean, sometimes I need to walk, sometimes the price is worth paying, but it always does seem to happen with those potions that I have worse pain a few days afterwards.”  
  
“When do you need to walk?” Draco asked, laying those vials back among the others and picking up the large, multi-colored glass container of the Joint-Easer. “I was under the impression that you never left the house.”  
  
Potter snorted. “When you have as many nieces and nephews and in-laws as I do, believe me, you leave the house a _lot_ for birthday parties.”  
  
Draco tilted his head in concession, and told himself that he did not need to disdain the Weasleys for that, that he might well have his own brood of children someday when they had found a more permanent solution to the problem of pure-blood fertility than simply being nice to house-elves. “This potion, on the other hand, promotes slow healing of the joint. It should have helped you more than it has so far. Exactly when were you injured?”  
  
“Two and a half years ago,” Potter said, and there was a spark of something deeper and hotter in his gaze. “I can give you the exact date if you want.”  
  
“Not for now,” Draco said, and then hesitated. He had been certain that Potter was simply not taking enough of the Joint-Easer, or not on a regular schedule, but the organization of Potter’s cupboard had stymied him. Leaving off the labels was the sort of thing that someone _comfortable_ with his potions would do, not someone who was too stupid to realize that a draught with a promising name might help him. “How bad was the injury at first?”  
  
“Bad enough that the Healers couldn’t do anything for it,” Potter said simply. “Bad enough that I couldn’t walk for two months. Bad enough that two of the Healers who treated me wanted to take the leg.”  
  
“They may have been able to replace it with a leg that would work better for you,” said Draco. “That would allow you to walk, at least.” He wondered if he had stumbled on some hidden well of Potter’s pride. Everyone wrote about how humble the Chosen One was, but Draco knew it had to be a lie. No one was _that_ humble.  
  
Potter’s nostrils flared, and that spark burned brighter in his eyes, making him look more like the Potter Draco remembered than at any time since he’d started visiting the house. It was amazing what that injury did, changing him and making him look more helpless and harmless. Perhaps he’d been right not to want to stand when they spoke to their first crowd. “Did you see what Mad-Eye Moody had to limp along on?” Potter whispered. “No.”  
  
Draco snorted. “So you were vain?”  
  
Potter smiled at him. “Call it that if you like,” he said, and then moved on. “Anyway. What about the Joint-Easer? I assumed you wanted to say something about it, since you held it up.”  
  
“I wanted to know how bad the injury was at first, because I thought the potion must be taking longer to heal it than I expected, but that would make sense if it was coming from a place of greater damage than I imagined,” Draco said. “But you can give me no exact terms, and the Healers who could are not here. Will you allow me to cast a spell on your knee?” He took up his wand, and held Potter’s eyes, and waited. Yes, Potter had stopped Draco from touching his knee earlier, but there was no reason to hold him back now, when he could _help._ Asking to touch in the first place was just a courtesy.  
  
But the longer Potter stared at him, the more Draco became certain that he _would_ refuse. “Well?” he sniped. “You want me to walk out of here and leave _you_ unable to do it?”  
  
*  
  
Harry constrained a sigh. Malfoy had the tendency to react badly to every time that someone crossed his will, even if Harry hadn’t done it formally yet.   
  
But he had always reserved the right to touch his knee for just Ron and Hermione. Not even Rose got to, or his own children, and out of all his nephews and nieces, he trusted them most. He’d got impatient with the Healers and their spells pretty early on in the recovery process, and if they couldn’t help him, then he might as well restrict the touching to people who he _knew_ would be gentle.  
  
And now Malfoy was asking.  
  
But Malfoy didn’t have Hugo’s dislike of the injury, or Victoire’s curiosity as a trainee Healer, or Rose’s longing that she’d inherited from her mother to look at everything and anything. It was possible Harry could trust him with it because he _didn’t_ care. The Healers had all been anxious that they be the ones who could help the Savior recover, but Malfoy didn’t have that same desire weighing on him.  
  
“All right,” he said, and leaned back, already wincing in anticipation of the way that Malfoy’s fingers would probably feel when they landed, but still willing to go ahead and let him do it.  
  
Malfoy gave Harry one more faint frown, as though he couldn’t imagine where the bracing came from, and then reached down and curved one hand above the knee. The other, holding his wand, lowered it in the gentlest of taps to the top of Harry’s knee—or, well, to the part where the bone bulged out oddly.  
  
It still made the whole thing tremble and hurt as though someone had embedded a thread of fire under the skin. Harry shut his eyes and gritted his teeth. Malfoy paused, but apparently decided to go ahead as long as Harry wasn’t actually saying anything, and murmured a spell.  
  
Harry had usually felt something when magic touched the knee, even if it came from the most delicate Healer he could imagine. This time was no different, but gentler than usual. Malfoy’s power seemed to spread healing ice across the skin, and then dive beneath it. Harry held his breath a moment to make sure that wouldn’t hurt even more, and then relaxed a little, digging his shoulders into the pillow.  
  
“You’re anxious,” Malfoy said, in a voice that Harry didn’t think he would have heard if he hadn’t relaxed. “I can hear your heartbeat from here.”  
  
“Yes, I get anxious when someone I don’t really know touches my knee,” Harry said, and opened his eyes to stare at the ceiling. He focused on the plaster flowers that some ancient Black had thought were good decorations for this room and began counting petals, something he had done more than once to distract himself. It was hard, because there was space between each petal that might actually be space or just another clustering part of the flower, done more roughly.  
  
Malfoy was silent then, for a time, his fingers flicking the air above Harry’s knee but not touching it directly. Harry shut his eyes at last and concentrated on his breathing. The flowers weren’t enough to calm him this time.  
  
At last, Malfoy made a small sound. Harry raised his head, slightly surprised at himself. He knew that Malfoy had made a noise of shock, but how could he know that? Malfoy was still a stranger to him.  
  
 _Well, I have to work with him. Maybe it’s best to accept any knowledge of him as a blessing._ “What have you found?” he asked aloud.  
  
*  
  
Draco stared at the glitter beneath him. He had cast a spell that essentially turned bone and skin and flesh transparent, and let him see into the pains and injuries that were part of them, pinned beneath his gaze like cold insects on an icy collection card.  
  
He had expected the marks of torture, the multiple dark lines that showed where the joint had been wrenched and shattered, the far deeper marks of pain. After Potter’s story of the warlocks, none of that would have surprised him.  
  
But there was something else, and it had taken him until now to realize that it ran deeper than those marks of pain, that it was loopy and lumpy and dark and thick, and wrapped around Potter’s knee joint like a rope. A curse, it had to be. A bone-bound curse, a flesh-bound curse, attached to Potter in the way that a spell would more normally be attached to an object, such as an enchanted dagger.  
  
“You have a curse on your knee,” he breathed, never taking his eyes away from the thing, half-afraid that he would lose track of it and it would become another mark, impossible to distinguish from the other brands of suffering, if he did. “Did you know that?”  
  
“Well, the warlocks put a lot of curses on it.”  
  
Draco looked up, shaking his head, and found that Potter’s face was a shock after all the secrets he had seen beneath the surface of his knee. Pale, normal skin, golden glasses, faded scars, and green eyes, the only startling thing there. Potter had sat up enough to tilt the knee towards Draco and heave his good leg off the bed, and his glasses glittered for a moment like Dumbledore’s as he trained his eyes on Draco’s.  
  
Draco immediately looked away from Potter’s face, scowling at himself for bringing the thought up, and said, “No. I don’t mean that. This is a different spell, one that’s meant to let the healing progress to a certain point and then continually disrupt it.”  
  
Potter was so silent for a moment, even the buzzing heartbeat that Draco had identified quiet, that Draco wondered if he was about to accuse Draco of lying. Then he said, voice faint, “Well, that would certainly explain some things.”  
  
“Why did no one else ever find it?” Draco asked of himself and Potter and the absent Healers, bending close to the knee again. The cracks and shattering patterns he could see all traced back to the spell, sure enough. It was obvious once you knew what you were looking for. And for trained Healers, it should have been _more_ than obvious. The curse was the center of Potter’s problems the same way that a hole chopped in ice would be the center of the crazy maze of broken ice that would result.  
  
“The Healers might not have looked deeply enough,” Potter said. “Or perhaps I stopped them too soon. At a certain point, the knee hurt so much that I didn’t want to hear what else they would suggest. I just wanted them to stop looking so I could go home and learn to live with it.”  
  
“Not like you, is it?” Draco said, transferring his gaze from the knee to Potter. “You faced everything unflinching, I thought.”  
  
Potter smiled, a little sadly. “If that was still true, then I would have tried to publicize the discovery about the house-elves the minute I made it, instead of waiting and hoping you could prove me wrong,” he said. “I don’t have that undiminished courage anymore. I’d give a lot for a little peace and quiet.”  
  
Draco shook his head, unable to understand. Yes, he wanted the same things, but he only wanted them as long as they were _complete._ “You couldn’t have peace as long as this was troubling you,” he said, and tapped Potter’s knee without thinking. The spell faded, hiding his vision of the curse, and Potter flinched.  
  
Draco pulled his hand awkwardly back. “That can start the pain ringing?” he asked.  
  
“Yes,” Potter muttered, closing his eyes and looking as though he rode on the back of a horse that had come close to throwing him. “Ringing. A good word.”  
  
“That tells me a little more about the kind of curse it might be,” Draco said, and sat back and up. “I’m going to solve this, Potter. Because the Healers _should_ have, and there are some people in St. Mungo’s who will be _embarrassed_ when it turns out that a mere Potions brewer knew more than they did.”  
  
Potter looked at him with an even fainter smile. “Thanks,” he said. “I know you didn’t have to do it. Thanks.”  
  
“It will make you more effective in the alliance,” Draco said, which was true, and more than enough excuse for the prickling flush that overcame his face—if anything _could_ be excuse enough for that. “I don’t want you doing what you did today, and straining yourself to the point that you can’t move far without pain. Sometimes, you’ll certainly have to endure longer meetings than that.”  
  
Potter nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “Maybe Hermione was wrong, allowing me to give up on finding a solution so quickly.” He paused, and an odd expression crossed his face for a moment. Then he said, “Is there anyone else other than the Healers at St. Mungo’s that you think curing the curse would prove wrong?”  
  
Draco blinked, then smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile, but Potter didn’t look inclined to back away in front of it. “Your friends, including Granger, if what you say about them acceding to your wishes is true.”  
  
Potter gave a small laugh. “Yes, of course. Thank you again, Malfoy.” He held out his hand, and this time, Draco felt less reluctance about clasping it. He could cast a Cleaning Charm on his hands once he was back home.  
  
“I’ll bring you better potions tomorrow,” he said, standing. “In the meantime, think about what you’re going to say to Longbottom and Bones.”  
  
Potter nodded and lay back, closing his eyes. Draco looked at him one more time before he turned away and went back down the stairs.  
  
It only occurred to him once he was outside the house and preparing to Apparate home that he had touched the skin of a half-blood’s knee and not flinched from it. He frowned, then shrugged. _Extra_ Cleaning Charms on his hands tonight. That had been a tactic that his father had sometimes used, and his wits and cunning were none the worse for it.  
  
*  
  
Harry clucked his tongue sharply as he thought about it. Malfoy hadn’t _said,_ but Harry couldn’t imagine that it wasn’t the case. He wanted Healers to respect him, sure, he would have fun proving them wrong, but wasn’t there someone closer to him that he would also delight in gaining respect from, which he didn’t have right now?  
  
 _I’ll talk to Scorpius tomorrow,_ Harry decided, and eased his leg back into its proper place, and fell asleep.


	11. Words of Respect

  
"What? You _want_ to talk to us?"  
  
Harry snorted in spite of himself. Al's face in the fire looked so wary that he wondered if he was projecting some aura of menace, despite sitting up in bed as he spoke to the fire and being wrapped in blankets like someone nearer Arthur Weasley's age than his own. "Yes, I do. Can you come by this afternoon?"  
  
Al bit his lip and looked aside for a second. "Um. They sort of caught us leaving Hogwarts the last time, to go to Malfoy Manor," he whispered.  
  
"What kind of detention did you get?" Harry asked in interest. He didn't know all the teachers at Hogwarts as well as he knew Neville, but he _did_ know that they seemed to have a lack of creativity when it came to punishments. Or maybe Snape had simply been a kind of inspired sadist.  
  
"Spreading Blast-Ended Skrewt shit on these experimental crops Hagrid has in the Forbidden Forest," Al said, and his frown grew.  
  
Harry laughed in spite of himself, and then tried to choke it off when he realized the way his son was glaring at him. "Well. Then it might have to wait a while. I don't want to get you into trouble; you do that enough on your own." Al relaxed, seeming reassured that Harry wasn't firecalling him for a bad reason. "But maybe next weekend? There's something I should talk to Scorpius about."  
  
"If you mean that idea you were spreading about house-elves, he already knows," Al said, with a shake of his head that recalled his mother to Harry, and especially the morning when she had decided that there was nothing more to be said, when they had _both_ decided that, and kissed and parted for the last time. "And I don't think it's going to change anything that you're working with his dad. Mr. Malfoy's always been a wanker, always will be."  
  
Harry was startled by the blaze that sprang to life inside his chest, sharper than anything he'd felt when Hugo sneered at him. "Al," he said. "Don't refer to him like that again."  
  
Al had always been better at judging Harry's mood and whether he was serious than Jamie or Lily had been. He opened his mouth, stared at Harry, shut it, and then opened it again to say, "Seriously, Dad. What is he _doing_?"  
  
"Helping me," Harry said, and shifted a little so that Al could tell he was bringing his knee closer to the fireplace, whether or not he could see it from that angle. Al was sensitive to little movements like that, too. He would be able to pick up on it.  
  
Al's mouth opened and closed and opened again. This time, what came out was, "But you're not going to start _liking_ him, are you? I mean, Scorpius doesn't even like him, and he's his _dad_!"  
  
"I intend to talk to Scorpius about that," Harry said calmly. "And it really doesn't matter whether I like him personally or not, Al. He's helped me, and he's helping me with the alliance to spread the ideas about house-elves and other magical creatures, and he might even help me with my knee. He's already found a curse on the joint that no one else noticed. That makes him a brilliant observer, at the very least. Who knows? He might be able to brew a potion that would help me walk again."  
  
Al stared at him again. Then he said, "I'll...make sure that we can talk to you on the weekend, at least. I don't know about getting away from the school. But I don't think that you're really going to change Scorpius's mind about his dad."  
  
Harry smiled at his son. "There were people who thought I couldn't kill Voldemort either, Al. And I know there are a lot now who think that I can't change the way anyone behaves towards house-elves. They're going to be proved wrong."  
  
"Scorpius isn't--he isn't _Voldemort,_ Dad." Al had a strange look on his face, half-queasy. Harry wondered idly if he was that upset at the idea of one of his parents disliking any of his friends. It was true that Scorpius was the most controversial of them, or would have been if both Harry and Ginny hadn't grown up a little before Al became friends with him.  
  
"Maybe this is the kind of battle that I have to fight right now, then," Harry said. "The kind of battle I can fight without moving out of bed. Just ask Scorpius to talk to me. I can owl him if he's absolutely unwilling."  
  
Al promised in a dazed little voice, and then shut the Floo connection. Harry leaned back on the pillows and shut his eyes, listening to the beat of his heart.  
  
Once, he would have felt exhausted after a conversation like that, one that had even a hint of conflict in it, and would have wanted a nap immediately. Now, the buzz of his heartbeat just sang through him, and he would have liked to leap out of bed and stride around the room. He shifted his bad leg on the pillow instead and reached for the parchment and quills he kept beside the bed. It was time to start writing a letter to Susan Bones.  
  
*  
  
Draco sat back from his Pensieve memory of the curse, and frowned. Yes, it did look much like the kinds of spells that were cast on daggers and swords, especially the kind that were meant for one hand only, and intended to poison anyone else who touched them. But there were also numerous differences that he hated the look of, and he had to wonder what they meant.  
  
There were those lines of shattering and breakage that extended out of the curse throughout Potter's knee, for one thing. Draco had accepted the first time he saw them that they were connected to the curse, and that removing the curse would remove them. It was not a stupid thing to think.  
  
 _Your father would not have thought it,_ said the quiet voice that was always at the back of his mind when Draco's thoughts were not perfectly in accord with Lucius's.   
  
_He wasn't a Potions brewer of my expertise, and he had no reason to help Potter,_ Draco thought back. _He never would have looked at all._  
  
And then he sat there and stared at the wall for a time before he wrenched his mind back on track, because he wasn't treacherous to his father that way. He aspired to be like him; he knew that Lucius had been craftier than he had, better controlled, more skilled at hiding his true feelings. Draco could value his own capacities, but not see them as in conflict with Lucius's without later discovering some memory that assured him his father had been cleverer and stronger than he was in _that_ area, too.  
  
He shoved the tangles aside to join the tangles over his feelings for Potter and Scorpius, and went back to the unexpected thing about the curse on Potter's knee.  
  
The lines of breakage radiated from it, now that Draco could study it more closely, but they weren't _connected_ to it. His metaphor of a hole in ice was inaccurate, after all. It was as if the curse just sent out poison, instead, and the poison would remain there if Draco removed the curse.  
  
 _Someone else could do it. The Healers at St. Mungo's could. You seem to have appointed yourself Potter's personal Healer for no reason._  
  
Draco dismissed that thought with a curled lip. He had begun this, and he would finish it. Besides, why hand Potter back over to the care of the same Healers who had missed the existence of this curse the first time around?  
  
The curse was also double-layered, not simply one rope of pain twisted through Potter's knee, but multiple folds, all invisible under the top dark line. Draco didn't know yet whether it was different spells that had been enchanted to look the same to a Healer's sight or the same spell cast multiple times, but either way, it would prove hard to heal.  
  
And then there were the thin lines of skin and muscle that had embraced the curse, cradling it. The magic was a part of the knee now in the same way that Potter's magical core was part of his vital organs. They couldn't simply yank it out.  
  
Draco snorted. _You couldn't have a simple problem to work on, could you, Potter? You just had to be challenging and live with the problem instead of complaining about it the way you could have, which would have meant someone investigated it and found out what was tormenting the Chosen One before it got to this point..._  
  
But he felt an undertone to his thoughts, as though he was about to smile without willing it, the way he so often had at Scorpius when he was a boy. Oh, Draco would enjoy this challenge, and although part of it would certainly be hard, boring work, there was prestige waiting if he chose to struggle for it.  
  
And there was the look that might come into Potter's pain-clear eyes, if he could remember for long enough who had done this for him...  
  
"Master Draco, there is being a firecall for Master Draco!"  
  
Draco jumped and turned around. The house-elves didn't usually bother him in his potions lab. He opened his mouth to snap at Orty, the elf with endlessly dripping eyes and nose who had interrupted him...  
  
And then stopped. Boring as it might be, he had to restrain himself, or reduce his own fertility, and perhaps Scorpius's chances, too. "Who is it, Orty?" he asked, with what he hoped came across as dignity instead of choked anger.  
  
"Mistress Astoria, Master Draco!" Orty bobbed several times, the rag around his waist hitting the floor each time.  
  
Draco relaxed a little. That explained why the elf had interrupted him, at least. Astoria and Scorpius still had access to the fireplaces and to him, or so the elves believed, because they had been born to or married Malfoys. Trying to teach them to forget about that had been more trouble than it was worth, so in the end Draco had accepted the inconvenience of these infrequent summons.  
  
Wondering now whether Astoria had come to threaten him again about his plans to disinherit Scorpius, Draco laid down the flat cover that he kept over his Pensieve whenever it had a particularly valuable memory in it and followed Orty to the Great Drawing Room.  
  
Astoria's face hovered in the fire, and she leaned forwards as though gripping the edge of her own hearth. "Did _you_ come up with this ridiculous deception that Potter's putting out?" she asked, fire-quiet.  
  
Draco stared at her, then shook his head. "What? No. I didn't want to believe it at first, in fact. It rather goes against my principles to imagine that _Granger,_ of all people, might have been right about something."  
  
He expected Astoria to smile at hearing him admit he'd been mistaken, or perhaps gape. Instead, she said, "I don't believe it. And I want you to stop spreading those rumors, or I'll reveal some of the secrets I gathered during my years of being chained to you."  
  
Draco's turn to gape, instead, and he didn't put a hand out to the back of a chair for balance simply because showing her even that much of his emotions was intolerable. "You are the one being ridiculous, Astoria." He kept his own voice more level, calm, as though that would convince her of her own stupidity. "I am helping Potter, but he is the one who made the discovery. And now that Granger has hold of it, it will spread faster than you can contain it, even if you reveal what I told you on our wedding night."  
  
He could hear Astoria's teeth grinding. Then she said, "You are doing this only so that you might look more natural when you disown Scorpius."  
  
"I have no idea how that would make me look more natural," Draco said. "Do you think that I'm _eager_ to reject my own son? I gave him chance after chance--"  
  
"You are going to do something that will make you look good in Potter and Granger's eyes," Astoria said, in the flat tones of someone who had heard a prophecy. "Perhaps donate to Granger's defense for house-elves with the nonsensical name, I don't know. And then you'll claim that you're free to disinherit Scorpius and marry again, because the magic that supposedly punishes pure-bloods--can you really tell me that you _believe_ that, Draco?--will have given you your fertility back. I won't allow you to do it."  
  
Draco felt something large and dangerous stir in him, and for the first time in years, he willingly thought of the Dark Lord summoning Nagini to feed. He leaned forwards and shook his head. "You don't understand, Astoria," he said. "This has nothing to do with Scorpius. Or everything to do with him. Do you want _him_ to be able to have children in the future, too? Then he is highly likely to marry someone from a pure-blood family, on at least one side."  
  
"He could marry a Muggleborn." Astoria looked ready to bite through steel.  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. "And this affects your grandchildren, too, even if he does. _They_ might want to marry pure-bloods. Astoria, why would I be doing something like this, overthrowing so many principles I've always accepted as true, simply to disinherit Scorpius? You know that I was willing to do so before Potter ever made the announcement."  
  
Astoria continued to stare at him. Then she said, "There is no other reason for you to do something like this."  
  
Draco grimaced. He wasn't about to give her an account of his own changed thought processes and what had led to them. She would only mock him whether he kept silence or confessed, so he would take the choice that led to the greatest amount of privacy for himself. "I thought about it, and although Potter might still be wrong, all the evidence I could come up with that he was was countered by something else in his theory."  
  
" _Theory_." Astoria snorted. Draco winced, and then remembered that he had done much the same thing earlier. Clearly, being around Potter was bad for him. "If you can call a set of airy suppositions with nothing to back them that."  
  
"We'll present the evidence in the second round of letters," Draco said steadily. "We wanted to stick to the basic outline first, because if we got too technical too fast, they'd reject it anyway."  
  
Astoria shook her head. "Potter and Granger believe in this, I'll grant them that. But you, Draco." She eyed him. "Your loyalty to your own family has always outweighed your loyalty to other pure-bloods. You only joined the war in the first place because the Dark Lord threatened your parents. So don't try to persuade me that you suddenly care about house-elves or the children that Scorpius might have or all the rest of it. You care about having the chance to enforce your perfect vision of the future on Scorpius."  
  
"Believe that if you want," Draco snapped, very near throwing up his hands and simply walking away. "You seem to."  
  
"All you need to do," Astoria said, leaning close again, "is believe _me_. Drop your support of them now, or I'll spread the rumors."  
  
Draco met her sparking eyes, and any hope that he could talk her around died. They had parted on bad terms--or what Draco would say were bad terms for Malfoy spouses, what with the open expression of emotions--and she had long since decided that he hated Scorpius and their son had only one parent who wanted to protect him. As a corollary of that, she was incapable of seeing Draco in any way that didn't relate to Scorpius.  
  
And so he did what he had known, in some quiet part of himself, that he was going to, perhaps from the moment that he had done something Lucius would not do.  
  
"Then spread the rumors," he said. "I'm sure I'll find them embarrassing, but the paper will have new stories to concentrate on from _our_ direction any day now, and they'll get lost in the flood."  
  
Astoria's eyes fluttered fast, the way they only did when she was nervous. "Do you understand the threat I'm making, Draco?" she asked finally.  
  
"Yes," Draco said. "What I think you don't understand is the power of my allies. Potter breaking silence for the first time since his injury, speaking a theory that will revolutionize the wizarding world? If I ask him to stand up for me, and I know he'll agree if only to protect our alliance, then your accusations will seem like so much straw in the torrent."  
  
Astoria looked at him. Draco looked back. He didn't know what to call the emotion that was thrumming through him right now. Nothing so thin as triumph, or at least what he had been accustomed to call triumph in the past few years. And happiness was a properly brewed potion, and smugness was knowing he had proved someone else's theory wrong.  
  
 _I wish Potter had not begun to teach me so many things. I do not know where I will stop, now._  
  
But Potter had no place in this confrontation between him and Astoria, except as a potential threat, and so Draco waited until Astoria spoke again, from what sounded like a dry throat.  
  
"I think that you will still rue this, Draco," she said through stiff lips, and then she shut the Floo connection and left Draco alone with the scrape and rustle of his heart.  
  
He found himself smiling at the hearth, and then turning around with new thoughts about the curse on Potter's knee already stirring in his head. He wasn't cowering the way Astoria would have expected him to. He did feel on edge, he could imagine the first reactions to the rumors Astoria would release, but he could think, he could plan, he could turn in many different directions.  
  
He tried to remember the last time he had felt like this...  
  
And remembered nothing more recent than his fifth year at Hogwarts, when he had thought that he had power because of Umbridge's Inquisitorial Squad, and his father had remained free.  
  
 _Twenty-eight years ago.  
  
So long ago, now.  
  
Perhaps that _ is _enough time for things to change._


	12. By Words Alone

  
The owl that fluttered around Harry dropped a feather in his cereal bowl before Harry could convince it to settle down on the back of his chair and take the message from it. Then he had to call Kreacher to make it a bowl of porridge, because apparently cereal half-softened by milk wasn’t the very best in owl fare and this bird felt that it deserved nothing less than the best. By the time that it shit on the back of his chair, Harry wasn’t in the best of moods where it was concerned.  
  
And that only got worse when he opened the letter and saw that it was from Scorpius, who said that he was very sorry but wouldn’t be able to talk to Mr. Potter until next week due to the sudden increase in his detentions.  
  
Harry leaned his head back—not enough to bring it into contact with the owl—and drummed with the letter against the edge of the table.   
  
He knew that Scorpius had made time for him before, that he had done almost anything he wanted to before, whether or not he was suffering punishment for sneaking out to go to Malfoy’s house or Grimmauld Place. The only conclusion Harry could come to was that Scorpius didn’t want to speak to him.  
  
And why not? Simply because Harry had enlisted Malfoy as an ally?  
  
Well, that was ridiculous. Harry trod carefully around Hugo because he had been devastated by an injury that had hurt Harry, too, and he was Ron and Hermione’s child. He _had_ parents. But it seemed that Malfoy couldn’t do anything with Scorpius, and Scorpius had always shown in the past that he respected Harry and would listen to him.  
  
So Harry would do what he should have done in the first place, and firecall the Gryffindor common room. He stood up from his chair, avoided Kreacher as he tried anxiously to support him, and limped towards the stairs.  
  
He knew that he would pay the price for his sudden burst of energy later, but there were pain potions he could take for that, and this was more important.  
  
*  
  
Draco swore as the latest potion melted into an unusable mess. After glaring at it for a while, which didn’t make the rotting-sweet smell or the sickly green color change in the slightest, he gave up on it and tipped it out into the sink.   
  
He had tried to use his memories of the curse on Potter’s knee to create a potion that would heal the damage. He had successfully worked before by combining memories with his natural talent at Potions, and done things by sheer intuition that he thought would have made Professor Snape proud.  
  
 _Better to have Professor Snape approve of things to do with brewing than your father._  
  
Another tiny, treacherous thought. Draco put that one, too, into the bundle of thoughts that he didn’t have time to deal with right now, and slapped his Pensieve down in front of him. The memory sprang to life the moment he ducked his head inside, and he stared at the spiraling galaxy of broken black lines and shook his head.  
  
It should be easier than this, it really should. There was something that made the memory slide away from him as soon as he thought he’d grasped it, and forget a breakage here, a line of damage there…  
  
Draco paused, his eyes narrowing and his grip on the edge of the Pensieve tightening until he thought it possible he would bend the soft metal. Then he stepped back deliberately and reached for the bezoar that sat on his lab table at all times. It was less that he thought he would poison himself with an experimental draught and more a reminder to himself that the most careful Potions master could die if confronted with a situation beyond his control, the way Snape had.  
  
When his hand closed around it, he felt a sharp surge of power that seemed to lance through his skull down to his toes, and bowed his head and gasped quietly. Then he looked again into the Pensieve, although he had to do a delicate balancing act for a moment to make sure he could hang onto the bezoar without knocking the Pensieve over.  
  
The picture of the curse looked different, now—and Draco was fairly sure that it wasn’t his memory that had changed, but his eyes. Someone had cast a spell among all the other spells, one that would project like a sudden thorn to touch anyone who might pierce through the first layer of protections. It deflected attention. It made someone looking at the knee assume that the damage was less than it should be. As a last-grade defense, it could blur the memories of someone trying to heal Potter.  
  
Someone had wanted Potter to _suffer_.  
  
Draco lifted his head slowly from the Pensieve and turned back to his experimental potions brewing with an expression that he knew would have made Scorpius pause if he was in the same room with him. Well, perhaps it would have made him pause, at least, and that slight chance was more success than Draco had achieved with his son in years.  
  
That explained why the Healers hadn’t healed Potter, and it explained why Draco might have the chance to. Because he was smart enough to notice the discrepancy, and brilliant enough to find a solution.  
  
 _I’m more brilliant than my father ever was._  
  
This time, there was no dissenting murmur from the back of his mind. Draco smiled, and spent some moments arranging the bezoar so that it hung around his neck on a slender collar that put it into contact with his bare skin. He didn’t think he had to have a hand free as long as it was skin-to-stone contact.  
  
And then he began to _really_ brew.  
  
*  
  
Harry had asked the young girl who answered the fire, with a wink, not to tell Scorpius that Harry Potter was firecalling him, because he wanted it to be a pleasant surprise. The girl, giggling and awed, had dutifully herded Scorpius along with promises about “someone” who wanted to talk to him, and now Scorpius was in front of the fire and would look really silly if he tried to back away.  
  
“Hullo, Scorpius,” Harry said calmly.  
  
“Mr. Potter.” Scorpius was leaning forwards with his shoulders hunched, in a way that told Harry his hands were probably on his knees. He had grown able to read defensive teenage firecall talk a decade ago.  
  
“I wanted to talk to you about your dad,” Harry said, shifting position so that his knee projected more towards the fire, just the way he had with Al. If it came down to manipulating the way that he appeared helpless and vulnerable in front of people because of his injury, then he’d do it. “Are you so reluctant to talk to me now just because he’s helping me with the house-elf research?”  
  
Scorpius’s mouth opened for a moment, and then closed. Then he said, “You know I have a really difficult relationship with him, Mr. Potter.”  
  
Harry nodded. “I know. I reckon I’m asking you to tell me about that. Are you going to stop talking to me because he’s helping me?”  
  
Scorpius looked away with a frown. Then he turned back. There was a reason that he had been Sorted into the House of the Brave, Harry thought, and it was there in the fire shining in his eyes.  
  
“He’s a wanker,” Scorpius said, low and fierce. “He’s always been a wanker. He told my mum that he didn’t care about her divorcing him, because she was too emotional to be a proper Malfoy wife. And he’s told me over and over again that I’m not a good heir for him, because I have Muggleborn _friends_. I can’t imagine what he would do if I told him that I wanted to marry one.”  
  
“Do you?” Harry asked, momentarily diverted. He couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t have heard about that, but perhaps this was one affair of the heart that Scorpius had managed to hide even from Lily, Harry’s usual source of Hogwarts gossip.  
  
“That’s not what I _meant_ ,” Scorpius said, though with a sharp blush that reminded Harry of the way Malfoy had looked after a few of their conversations. “I mean, I don’t believe him when he acts as though he cares about who pure-bloods not in his family marry. He’s only doing this to—to make himself look better, or something. He doesn’t _believe_ it.”  
  
“I think he does,” Harry said. “I offered him the chance to prove my theory wrong, and he wasn’t able to do it.”  
  
Scorpius made a single sharp, curved motion with one hand. “You should have had someone else take a look at it, Mr. Potter. I mean, no offense, but you’re new to this, and my father isn’t the fastest broom in the shed.”  
  
Harry waited a moment, for the appalled defensiveness that had burst inside him like a firework to flare and die, and then said, “I’m new at this. But your dad knows a lot more about pure-blood history and genealogy than I do, and he took the threat seriously. And I think that he’s thinking about who you’ll marry. What if your spouse can’t have children? What if your children can’t have children? That’s the way it matters to him.”  
  
Scorpius tensed up, and then sprang around on hands and knees. His eyes were brighter than ever now, and Harry heard a confused chatter behind him, as though the other kids in the common room were taking notice. Scorpius roared over his shoulder at them, and the chatter shut up. Scorpius’s head turned slowly back to stare at Harry.  
  
“He’s _lying_ ,” Scorpius whispered. “He couldn’t change his mind on that, so quickly. Even if he decided that he could work with _you_ , because you’ve talked to each other sometimes thanks to me and Al, he would never work with Al’s Aunt Hermione.”  
  
Harry smiled wryly. “It’s been a battle, trying to urge them to cooperate,” he admitted. “But it’s also been more fun than I anticipated.” He paused when he saw the look on Scorpius’s face. “Scorpius, no, really, I mean it. This is something to wake me up out of the stupor that I’ve been in the past few years.”  
  
“You haven’t been in a stupor,” Scorpius snapped. “Is that another thing he told you? He’s always doing that, trying to persuade you to listen to him for what he says is your own good. Lying and complaining—”  
  
“No,” Harry said, and used a tone that he hadn’t used in years, one that he was more accustomed to use on rebellious junior Aurors than his children’s friends. Scorpius fell silent and stared at him again. “No one tried to convince me of anything that I didn’t want to believe. I simply want to know why you didn’t show your father more respect, and now I know. Well. You ought to realize that I wouldn’t work with anyone who constantly insulted me unless I believed they could _help,_ that there was a greater goal out there than getting anyone to revere me.”  
  
“That’s not what I meant,” Scorpius said, face pale and tense now. “I think that he’s lying, holding his contempt in reserve, hiding it. But sooner or later, he’ll betray you just the way he betrayed my mother.”  
  
Harry snorted in spite of himself. “I’m hardly going to marry him, Scorpius.”  
  
“You’ll see,” Scorpius reported mournfully, and the fire winked out, taking his face with it, before Harry could form a reply.  
  
Harry leaned back thoughtfully in his chair. It sounded as though Scorpius had something of the same problem as Hugo, though of course with a different person. Hugo imagined that Harry’s injury was the center of the universe, and that Harry had to feel sorry for himself and mourn his lost ability to be a field Auror, because that was the way Hugo felt. And Scorpius imagined that his father had to act like a wanker around Harry, because that was the way he acted around Scorpius.  
  
That still didn’t lessen Harry’s determination to change Scorpius’s attitude, though. Ultimately, he couldn’t do much about Hugo’s because he didn’t want to change himself, but he _knew_ that Malfoy was a better person than Scorpius was painting him, and that enough evidence on that side of the books might change Scorpius’s mind. Scorpius was two years older than Hugo, and that much more reasonable.  
  
 _I am going to show him, and Hermione, and all the rest of them, that Malfoy really isn’t a bad person._  
  
*  
  
It was one of those potions where there was distance between what Draco wanted to do and what he knew he was going to achieve. He could imagine the potion that he would brew for Potter, shining perfect in yellow-green, looking like leaves with the sunlight falling on them, so thick that Potter would have to scoop it up with one hand and slather it over his knees, where it would cling and smell like ripening grapes.  
  
In reality, the potion that took shape under his hand was a deeper green, and thinner in consistency. Draco scooped it up and shaped it with a few motions of his fingers, and it broke and trickled back into the cauldron. He sniffed deeply, but smelled bananas instead of grapes.  
  
Now, though, with the memory working in his head and the determination and skill working in his fingers, he knew that he was going to arrive at his goal. So he shouldn’t be too disappointed that it wouldn’t match perfectly with his dream.  
  
Between one blink and another, the potion surged and glittered and reached that final moment, the one that was so hard to define for someone else. When Scorpius couldn’t learn it, Draco knew his son would never be a Potions master, even if he was a good Potions student. You knew it by instinct or not at all.  
  
 _And Professor Snape would despise you for saying something like that. He believed in skill and art, not instinct._  
  
 _So did your father._  
  
Draco shook his head slowly, eyes fixed on the potion. He scooped up some of it with a ladle, and it broke and clung to the sides of the ladle the way that it was supposed to. He didn’t dare taste it, of course, because it was meant for Potter, and he didn’t know what it would do to him if it found its way into his body.  
  
But this was the way _he_ worked. By instinct, and going along with his emotions sometimes and violating them at others. He had tried so hard to keep them subdued and unexpressed for years, but he knew, now, that it hadn’t worked. He had still shown them when he talked to people like Astoria and Scorpius, who knew him well.  
  
 _But not well enough._  
  
Draco poured the potion into a vial and corked it, moving sedately, half in a dream. Then he dropped the vial into his pocket and stepped towards the Floo. It was time that he contact Potter and tell him about the possible threat from Astoria to their project, which he hadn’t done yesterday. And about the potion and that he might be able to heal most of the damage done to his knee, of course.  
  
 _Potter brings out emotions in me._  
  
His father’s voice whispered from the back of his skull, telling him to avoid Potter at all costs, then, that he _had_ to or he would end up a sobbing mess. But Draco only smiled and threw more Floo powder on the fire, making it spark and flare as he called out the name and number of Grimmauld Place.  
  
 _If they’re the right emotions, expressed the right way, then I don’t need to worry._  
  
That was probably the problem he had had all these years, he thought. His father was able to work with a perfectly blank and cold mask, but not Draco. The feelings bubbled up no matter how hard he tried to keep them down, so it was best to just go ahead and work with them until he learned how to wield them like other weapons.  
  
The Floo powder caught, and opened the fireplace to show Potter’s face. He looked up from something in his lap. Draco thought it might have been a letter, but then wondered if it was the edition of the _Daily Prophet_ that Astoria had begun spreading her rumors in. He had been too busy during the last day to check the paper when it was delivered this morning.  
  
“Malfoy, hello,” Potter said, and smiled at him. “Have you written the letter to Highfeather?”  
  
Draco shook his head. “Not yet. Something else happened.” He held up the vial of potion, and watched Potter’s eyes widen as they fixed on it. He did want to walk again, Draco thought, no matter how convenient he found his leg as an excuse to stay apart from politics. “May I come through?”  
  
“Yes,” Potter said, and shifted backwards. Draco cast in more powder and stepped through.  
  
For some reason, he had thought he would step into the drawing room, the one room of the house where he had always arrived so far. Instead, he was in Potter’s bedroom, and the door of the potions cupboard was closed, making Draco pay more attention to the faded paper on the walls, the plaster roses on the ceiling, the ridiculous blue-and-yellow checked pattern of Potter’s quilt. He had the quilt draped over his legs, of course, and looked like a kindly old grandfather. Draco sneered and handed him the potion.  
  
“This is a potion that should do some of the healing for the curse,” he said shortly. “Or at least enable you to feel some relief from the pain. No one else had found the curse because it had a secondary spell on it that deflected attention.”  
  
He intended to go on, to explain about Astoria and the other reasons that he hadn’t got around to writing the Highfeather letter yet, but Potter cradled the potions vial between his hands, staring at it, and then looked up at Draco with a shining face.  
  
Draco swallowed slowly. There was a lightness in his head and a trembling in his limbs that, he told himself, came from not eating much today. He sat down.  
  
“Thank you,” Potter whispered.  
  
Draco nodded shortly back. There was no reason for him to feel as though he was floating, he thought. Except lack of food.


	13. From a Highfeather Direction

  
“Madam Highfeather.”  
  
The face in Draco’s fire nodded stiffly. Draco leaned back and slung one leg casually across the other. In the end, he and Potter had agreed that it would be best if he handled the initial conversation with Highfeather as well as the initial letter. The letter she had sent back was full of enough insults that Draco knew she needed extra graciousness.  
  
And Potter…  
  
Well, Draco had to admit, rather against his will, that Potter had an unexpected share of gifts, but grace was not one of them, in any sense of the word.  
  
Highfeather stared at Draco for a while. But Draco’s father had used stares of the same kind to disconcert him when he was a child, and he had grown immune to them; Lucius would not have been satisfied until he did. He looked back, as unruffled as the stagnant pond he had seen in Potter’s back garden, and finally Highfeather nodded with less stiffness than the first time.  
  
“Your proposal is interesting,” she said. “But far from acceptable.”  
  
Draco spread his hands. “This is the part where my colleagues are inclined to stumble,” he said, blending several layers of emotion together in his voice specifically for Highfeather to read. “I told them that they could not expect our kind to change their traditional ways all at once. But you know Granger’s reputation as a fighter for the rights of magical creatures.” From the way that Highfeather’s brow creased, Draco was willing to bet that she not only knew it, she had been the target of Granger’s attempts to “free” her house-elves on at least one occasion. “And Potter is more suited to direct action than diplomatic negotiation.”  
  
Highfeather smiled, pleased, as Draco had known she would be, by the implication that she was as important as an affair of state. “Hence you,” she said.  
  
Draco inclined his head. “Hence me.”  
  
“What could be compelling enough evidence to make you side with the likes of Potter and Granger against your own kind?” Highfeather stared now like the hawk that was her family’s symbol, attempting to make Draco feel like a mouse.  
  
Again, the attempt met Draco and slid off him. He could control his emotions in these discussions, he reminded himself. It was _his_ decision what he might do with them, and not Highfeather’s. He leaned farther back in his chair and smiled at her.   
  
“Evidence that I could not prove wrong,” he said. “Evidence in magical theories that no one had researched before Potter precisely _because_ most of us tend to understand our relationship with magical creatures in more intuitive terms.” He was particularly proud of that circumlocution. “Evidence that said that wizards that had obeyed laws passed by the Ministry to treat house-elves better produced families of four or five children, and when those laws were rescinded, the number of children plummeted.”  
  
That made Highfeather’s eyes widen, as Draco had known it would. Though the wars with the Dark Lord were partially to blame, families of four or five children were unknown in the pure-blood world for the last six generations.  
  
 _At least,_ Draco thought reluctantly, his mind shuddering a little from the way it had to expand, _in the traditional pure-blood world._ The Weasleys were indeed pure-bloods and had been producing broods larger than that, although Draco found it hard to remember without a major effort.  
  
“There could be other causes,” Highfeather said, lowering her voice. “Correlation is not causation.”  
  
Draco blinked a bit, and then nodded as though seriously considering the point. In reality, he had nearly laughed aloud at Highfeather quoting a statement that Draco heard most often in Potions theory articles from Potions masters of Muggle background. He wondered if perhaps she had read the same articles, if only to know her enemy.  
  
“That is true, madam,” he said. “But in this case, I could not find another explanation that suitably fit the facts. Especially when families who benefited magical creatures in other ways, such as the Weasleys who initiated a treaty with the centaurs, found themselves with more children than normal. It is not all house-elves.”  
  
Highfeather’s eyes narrowed, as Draco had known they would. Many pure-blood families would find it to easier to benefit beautiful magical creatures like phoenixes or unicorns than to treat their house-elves better.  
  
“How interesting,” she said. “But not the kind of evidence that I would build a revolution upon.”  
  
 _You would not build a revolution at all,_ Draco thought. _You would let things continue the same as they have always been, and you would let our children die._  
  
That made him want to laugh again, because he would sound exactly like Potter or Granger if he spouted _that_ nonsense, and yet it had crept into his head, where normally his father’s thought echoed alone.  
  
He would deal with that later. For now, he gave Highfeather a deprecating smile and said, “I know. But it is enough for me to join forces with Potter and Granger on. If nothing else, if we can make sure that true pure-bloods are in control of this revolution…”  
  
He let the implication trail off. Highfeather raised her eyebrows and tilted her head slightly, as though the hawk was examining the prey from another angle before diving. And that was all Draco wanted, in truth. He did not think they would change her convictions today. This was about opening a breach in the otherwise impregnable wall of them.  
  
“Your perspective is interesting,” Highfeather said abruptly. “But I will see the evidence before I will decide.”  
  
Draco inclined his head. “Of course. Would you prefer that I owl you with them, or Harry Potter?”  
  
He watched with a faint smile as Highfeather’s chest inflated. She liked the implication that she was important enough for attention from celebrities, and Potter had the kind of power to his name—if he would _use_ it, which at least seemed true for magical creatures if not for himself—that made the attention flattering despite his mother’s background.  
  
“He is to owl me,” Highfeather said. “And a personal word from him would not go amiss.”  
  
Draco inclined his head. “Of course,” he said. Next time, it would be Potter in front of the fireplace and not him, and that would just have to do. He would coach Potter beforehand, and he might not do _too_ terribly when reading from Draco’s prepared script. “I will ensure that he does so.” It wouldn’t be a bad idea for Highfeather to get the idea that pure-bloods were in control of the really important things that Potter was doing, at all levels. From the smile that broadened across Highfeather’s face like blood spilled on snow, she knew and appreciated all the nuances that Draco had meant to put into the remark.  
  
That led to the traditional exchange of pleasantries at the end of a firecall, and Draco leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed, feeling much better than he had when the call began.  
  
“How did it go?”  
  
Draco started and turned his head. It was still possible for him to forget that he had invited Potter over to the Manor this morning. He had agreed to stay out of the study while Draco made the firecall to Highfeather, in case she saw him over Draco’s shoulder and imagined that Draco wasn’t in absolute control. But he leaned against the doorway that led into the dining room now, his leg wrapped in the charms that Draco had showed him which would keep it from contact with anything, and cocked his head curiously.  
  
Draco shrugged. “Well enough.” He stood up and took an impatient step towards Potter. “Did you take the potion this morning?”  
  
“Half the dose last night, and half the dose this morning.” Potter stepped with his good leg, and the bad one automatically floated along beside him, rather as though he was leaning on a bobbing crutch for support. It looked awkward and ugly, and Draco wondered that he could bear it, but perhaps anything was better than sitting in the middle of Grimmauld Place for the thousandth day in a row, starting at that ugly paper. “I haven’t noticed any effects yet, though.”  
  
“You wouldn’t,” Draco said, with a shrug that he hoped looked casual to Potter. He would use his emotions as necessary in the conduct of this task, but he didn’t want to show every change of mood to Potter. “It will take a few days to work.”  
  
Potter nodded. “I know,” he said, and smiled at Draco. Draco blinked. _Where was that smile when he wanted to influence people as an Auror? A few of those, and the wizarding world would have followed at his heels._ “I wanted to thank you again for doing this.” He paused. “And I wanted to do something for you, but I forgot to mention it last night in the excitement over the potion and the discussion of what we should do about Highfeather.”  
  
“Go on,” Draco said, and folded his arms to conceal the beat of his heart. With his glasses, Potter might not be observant enough to notice that, but just in case, Draco ducked his head to conceal the flutter of the pulse in his throat as well. “Explain to me what you wanted to give me, and what you’ve already done.”  
  
*  
  
 _He looks nervous._  
  
But Harry wasn’t about to point that out, not when Malfoy had already given him this potion and done so much for him—not because he had to, but because he wanted to. Of course, it meant that Malfoy simply enjoyed the challenge of brewing and not anything to do with Harry, but that really didn’t matter. He had still overcome his prejudice to do this much, and that, to Harry, was an amazing achievement.  
  
 _Now let’s hope he can overcome his prejudice against someone else talking to his son._  
  
“I know that Scorpius respects me,” he said, leaning his back briefly against the wall. The charms that Malfoy had taught him were wonderful, and kept his weight off his leg, but it was still a strange sensation for someone who was used to sitting instead of standing. “And he doesn’t respect you, much.”  
  
Malfoy’s eyes narrowed, and Harry could _feel_ the arctic chill that came sweeping over him. “Thank you for informing me of that extremely obvious fact,” he said, words so clipped that Harry could have used them to shave with.  
  
Harry shook his head. “I disagree with the reason he doesn’t respect you. I think he doesn’t know you very well.”  
  
“He knows me well enough to use you as a weapon against me.” Malfoy’s mouth had gone small, and he checked the distance between him and Harry as though wondering how many Muggleborn germs he would have to rub away. Harry hadn’t seen that look since the first afternoon they were working together.  
  
Harry sighed. “I didn’t bring it up to scold you. I scolded _him_ , actually. Sort of. Firecalled the Gryffindor common room and didn’t tell him it was me at first because I sent him a letter and he refused to speak to me.”  
  
Malfoy blinked. “What?”  
  
“Apparently you’re the source of all evil,” Harry said, determined to carry on rather than try to answer questions that he didn’t think he understood as yet. “And when I tried to point out that the source of all evil and someone who hated me enough to kill me wouldn’t work on a project like this, he told me you were a liar and you must be in it for some other reason.”  
  
“I threatened to disown him,” Malfoy said. “I’m fairly certain that he thinks I’m only working on this to try and produce another child.”  
  
Harry paused and looked at him. “Are you?”  
  
“Thinking of revoking the aura of sainthood that you tried to extend to me?” Malfoy was sneering now, in the best tradition of the schoolboy Harry had known at Hogwarts, his arms up and his mouth pursed. “You might as well. You know that I’m not exactly what you imagined, because you can’t comprehend somebody who’s lived as a pure-blood all his life.”  
  
“I don’t think I can understand without you explaining, no,” Harry said, and flashed him a quick smile that Malfoy didn’t seem to know what to do with. “I’m not _that_ arrogant. But I do think that you’re not a villain, any more than I’m a hero. I hope you won’t disown Scorpius. But I also hope that Scorpius can learn that you’re not someone who really needs his disdain.”  
  
Malfoy spent another few minutes staring. Harry shifted his weight again. The bobbing leg didn’t _hurt_ , but it was a disconcerting sensation. Maybe he’d learned to live with pain so well that lack of it bothered him as much as feeling it did.  
  
“You can’t influence what I do,” Malfoy said at last, in a curiously flat voice.   
  
“I thought I already did,” Harry said. “I influenced you to create the potion you gave me, and I influenced you to join forces with me instead of decide that you needed to prove my theory wrong at all costs.”  
  
Malfoy’s muscles rippled like a tiger’s, but he relaxed his jaw before whatever words he was planning could come out. When he finally spoke, Harry had the feeling that he’d thought more deeply about the words. “That is separate from what influence you might hope to exercise over me in the matter of my son.”  
  
 _Did you know that you sound constipated when you speak through your nose like that?_ Harry thought, but decided that it would hardly be productive to say that aloud. “All right. I acknowledge that. Do you want me to back off and stop talking to Scorpius? I can do that, if you would prefer.”  
  
*  
  
Small stars danced in the corners of Draco’s vision, and his mouth jerked, and his stomach twisted, and he wished he knew what to yell at Potter.  
  
Or if he should yell at him.  
  
What was the worst Potter could do? Draco had already lost Scorpius in the most important ways, the ones that mattered. Astoria would tell him the things Draco had confessed to her on his wedding night, and that meant Scorpius would turn his back further. Draco couldn’t get along with someone who had no respect for him, and no respect for what the Malfoy line meant. If Scorpius walked away from him, that was only the more formal recognition of the split that Draco’s words and intentions had already put between them.  
  
He shrugged and turned his back, towards the table where he had already laid out the parchment and ink and quills that Potter would need to write his owl to Highfeather. “Do as you please. I don’t think he’ll reconcile with me, but you’re welcome to try.”  
  
There was a silence that stretched long enough that Draco looked over his shoulder, wondering if Potter had fallen to the floor. But no, Potter was giving him another of those breathtaking smiles that were enough to overcome the world.  
  
“Thank you,” he said simply, and then began float-limping towards the table. “How would you advise me to address her? Madam Highfeather, the way you did?”  
  
Draco stepped back and blinked. Then he buried himself in the comforting minutiae of a pure-blood culture he knew well, and said, “Yes, that would be acceptable. You should also try to convey the impression that addressing her is one of the great joys of your life, and that you’re awed and humbled to be approaching her. Without actually _saying_ that outright, of course. Even she would distrust that much flattery.” He leaned towards Potter. “Do you think that you can do that?”  
  
“I learned a little about flattery when I was an Auror,” Potter said easily, and sank into the chair, propping his leg off to the side. “Even if it wasn’t as extensive as this, it ought to be drawing on lessons that I’ve already learned.”  
  
Draco nodded and watched over his shoulder as he began to write. Potter’s writing was neater than on the parchments and notes Draco had read from him, but perhaps that was the difference between a public document and ones he had thought only he and a few other people would read.  
  
That made Draco wonder if they should preserve the general messiness and the shapes of the letters when they made copies of Potter’s notes for other people. On the one hand, it might be easier to read if they standardized them; on the other, it would reassure people who thought Draco rather than Potter was the originator of the theory, and it would give a pleasing air of authenticity that would combat those looking for mistakes.  
  
“Like this?” Potter asked, and leaned back to hand Draco the letter.  
  
Draco started. He hadn’t realized that he’d fallen into what was practically a daydream over his strategy plans. He reached out and took the letter, eyeing the flourishes on the signature. He wondered for a moment if Potter had signed his Auror memos this way.  
  
It wasn’t perfect, but Draco didn’t want to correct the mistakes, because they were ones that fell on the side of convincing Highfeather that Potter was someone she could manipulate. The correct amount of flattery and bluster from someone who felt inferior in the presence of pure-bloods—which Highfeather would naturally assume Potter did. And a nice closing paragraph about how he looked forward to any new information Highfeather could give him about his notes and theories.  
  
Draco smiled in spite of himself, and looked up to give the short praise that he thought was due Potter for writing something like this. He found Potter leaning on the back of his chair with his arms folded in front of him, a faint smile of his own on his face.  
  
“What?” Draco demanded.  
  
“I like watching you,” Potter said simply.  
  
Draco could have frozen, could have stared, could have demanded to know what he meant. But in the end, it wasn’t worth asking. He simply nodded and turned away with the letter in his hand, preparing to fetch Potter’s notes and theories.   
  
“ _Really_ like it,” Potter said behind him, in the kind of musing, dreaming voice that Draco had used before when he was talking to himself and didn’t really care if anyone else heard him.  
  
Draco elected to keep walking.


	14. Lapped in Uncertainty

  
“I don’t think that’s going to work.”  
  
Harry leaned back in his chair, sipped his tea, and concentrated on yesterday's _Prophet_ spread out in front of him. When Hermione started a conversation like this, he only had to wait for what she would say, not ask. “What?” he said mildly.  
  
“Approaching Highfeather like that.” Hermione washed back and forth in front of him, briskly pacing, her arms folded as if she had to keep herself from striking out and thought the best way to do that was to wrap her heart up tightly. “There are other pure-bloods who will object that _they_ didn’t get a personal letter from you. And what will the Muggleborns feel when they find out that you’re communicating with someone who spoke up like a personal enemy?”  
  
Harry folded the paper down on the table and smiled at her. “I’d hope they’d understand the necessities of politics and compromise like the adults they bloody well are,” he said.  
  
Hermione stopped pacing and stared at him. Her mouth stretched wide around words, but she didn’t speak them, until at last she made a weak noise like a dying kitten.  
  
“Malfoy was the one who came up with this plan,” Harry said, leaning back and stretching his arms over his head. He was acting more and sleeping better as a consequence, without the little naps where he’d drop off in the middle of the afternoon, but as a natural follow-up to that, his muscles were starting to ache more. “And you had your chance to object when he did. You didn’t seem interested in objecting. So that means that we’re going ahead with the plan, and now the first part of it is done.”  
  
“It’s just,” Hermione muttered, and tapped her fingers against one knee and looked away from his calm, neat gaze. “I’m getting owls from Muggleborns who say that they feel we’re focusing too much on pure-bloods.”  
  
Harry snorted. “Pure-bloods are the source of the problem. That’s like complaining that we’re talking about polluted water and concentrating too much on fish instead of desert animals.”  
  
Hermione blinked again, maybe at the comparison, and then said, “But I do feel that it’s a legitimate complaint. They could be a problem if they felt you were spending too much of your time and attention elsewhere, and started claiming that the Savior of the Wizarding World was abandoning them.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “Anyone who wants to can see my notes and theories. And if you give me a list of important names, then I can write owls to them. But part of this movement is approaching the pure-bloods and giving them their fair share of information so that they’ll actually change their minds, Hermione. You _know_ that.”  
  
“I wasn’t sure if you did,” Hermione said, and sucked her lip. “Harry…are you sure that you know what you’re doing, listening to Malfoy?”  
  
Harry smiled and leaned forwards over the table. “Why don’t you get the list of important names to me, Hermione? That’s what I can do best right now. Write owls and talk their ears off, and explain the theory to anyone who wants to know about it, and the ways that we tried to prove it wrong and weren’t able to. I’m not up to traveling on long journeys.”  
  
“None of that has anything to do with listening to Malfoy or not listening to him,” Hermione said obstinately, setting her hands on her hips and glaring at him.  
  
Harry rolled his eyes. “Yes, it does,” he said. “He’s the one who can recommend the important pure-bloods to me for attention, and tell me how to handle them. He’s doing the same work that you’re doing, but from the other side.”  
  
` “But what if he tries to encourage you to give up the notion of placing magical creatures at the center of your concern?” Hermione asked, her voice rising just a little. “Like I said, I’m hearing a lot about how much of the rhetoric focuses on pure-bloods and their chances of having children. But we should remember that the magical creatures are the real victims here. The pure-bloods are the ones who caused their own problems.”  
  
Harry nodded. “I know that,” he said, and wondered that Hermione should argue about this. She had used similar tactics herself in her fight to free house-elves. But perhaps she hadn’t had to work with anyone she despised as much as she despised Malfoy. “This isn’t the thing that we believe is the unvarnished truth, but the thing that we hope will draw the pure-bloods in and make them see that it’s in their own self-interest to treat magical creatures better.” He softened his voice a little when he saw the way that Hermione stared at him and gnawed her lip. “Hermione. _Please._ I know what I’m doing.”  
  
Hermione sighed, and this time, it really did sound as if it had drained her body all the way to the roots. “As long as you’re sure.”  
  
Harry nodded. “And if you see a sign of corruption from Malfoy in me, then I know you’ll help me to deal with it quickly. But it has to be a real sign, not just something that you think you see, or imagine.”  
  
Hermione flashed him a quick, hurt look, but Harry continued to smile at her, and then she nodded. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t made any progress with Hugo yet,” she said, taking out a list of names and sliding it across the table to him.  
  
Harry scanned the list, and found some people he’d heard of and some people he hadn’t. Well, that made sense. Hermione, in her own way, was as conscious of blood status as Malfoy was, while Harry had simply worked on the cases he was assigned as an Auror, regardless of who the victims’ families were. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “In the end, he’ll probably have to come around by himself.”  
  
There was silence, and then he looked up to find Hermione staring at him fixedly. “You believe that?” she whispered. “You believe that he’ll come around, when it’s been two years and he hasn’t, yet?”  
  
Harry shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, wishing he could move on, and that Hermione hadn’t brought up Hugo. At the moment, he had more important things to worry about. “I’m only saying that, _if_ he’s going to get over this, then I think his own head is the source of how he’s going to do it.”  
  
Hermione looked at him a little longer, then sighed. “Let me know when you’ve written those letters,” she said, turning away. “I have a few more historical investigations that I want to do in the library.” The Black library, she had told Harry, was full of information on the old treaties between wizards and magical creatures once you knew what you were looking for. Not many of them had been discussed in much detail because, once, arranging private deals with the magical creatures was something the pure-blood families did as a regular business affair.  
  
Left alone at the table, Harry reached for the list of names. Maybe he could concentrate on what he was supposed to be doing to help their revolution and not the endless feuds between Hermione and Draco, now.  
  
Then the _Prophet’s_ owl fluttered down and dumped today's paper in front of him, and Harry realized the story on the front page was about Draco and not all of them. And it was illustrated with a restless, constantly head-turning photograph of Astoria Greengrass.   
  
He picked it up with a restlessness like Astoria’s moving in his gut. He would only read the first few lines of the story, he told himself, and then he would apply himself to the work that he had been so grateful to receive a moment ago.  
  
But the first lines drew him in, and he began to realize that Hermione certainly would have mentioned this story if she had read it this morning before she came over. That meant she hadn’t seen it, and he needed to read it first before the inevitable firecalls telling him how wrong he had been to support Draco.  
  
So he settled in, and read.  
  
*  
  
Draco ate his way through his porridge, and read the story. He always read the front page of the _Prophet_ at breakfast, he told himself, and just because he was on that page this morning was no reason to alter his custom. His father hadn’t changed what he liked to do simply because small details shifted in the world around him, and that was one of his traits that Draco thought worth retaining.  
  
 _Once, you would have thought it was all of them._  
  
 _And now I don’t think that,_ Draco answered, and read.  
  
Astoria had done a good job; she had confessed _everything._ And the photographer chosen to illustrate the story had done a good job, too. Astoria’s picture looked vulnerable and lost, as though she was about to be kicked out of her home for telling the truth.  
  
As he read the piece, Draco wondered idly how many of the others doing so would remember that he and Astoria had been divorced years ago, and that Scorpius was as free to spend time with his mother as with his father, especially now that he could Apparate. Probably not many.  
  
 _Potter will._  
  
Unaccountably, that gave Draco strength to read beyond the first few paragraphs.  
  
*  
  
 _DRACO MALFOY: STILL A COWARD AT HEART?_  
  
 _An exclusive interview with Malfoy’s former wife and the mother of his child_  
  
Draco Malfoy stunned the pure-blood world recently by coming out as a supporter of the Chosen One’s theories—politely described by Alicia Highfeather as “wild” to this correspondent—that low numbers of pure-blood children came from the way that wizards have treated magical creatures, especially house-elves, down the years.  
  
But now it turns out that he may have a rather unexpected reason for doing so. Draco Malfoy’s former wife, Astoria Greengrass, contacted me with an offer to explain that reason, as she does not want her ex-husband to do damage to the wizarding world.  
  
I sat down with Ms. Greengrass in her comfortable home near Hogsmeade. The walls around me were covered with portraits of the Greengrass family, including Ms. Greengrass’s elder sister, Daphne, a member of the prestigious Wizengamot.  
  
“Draco told me some intimate secrets down the years,” Ms. Greengrass said, leaning back in her chair and fixing me with a piercing stare. She is still a handsome woman, without a streak of white in her glowing blonde hair. And her eyes are the sort of blue-green that you might find at the bottom of a particularly serene pool. That color, however, does nothing to lessen her formidability. “This happens to many a married couple, you know, even the ones who married for as shallow a reason as we did. Beauty, and to keep money in the family,” she adds, before I can ask.  
  
She then tells me how Mr. Malfoy confided several things to her when they were married: that he still fears being called out as a Death Eater, despite the years that have passed since the war; the _real_ amount of the money in his Gringotts vault; the depth of his obsession with retired Auror Potter, who was his schoolboy rival.  
  
But the key to understanding him, she says, is what he confessed on their wedding night. As if to emphasize the special nature of that confession, and the way that she plans to repeat it to me now, she leans forwards, and the sun catches her hair and sets it on fire.  
  
“He told me,” she whispers, “that everything he’s done has been at the behest of his father. He joined the Death Eaters to save his parents. His father is the one who told him to marry me, who discouraged him from making a career in Potions instead of discreet experiments, who instructed him in how many children to have and the terms of his marriage contract. Draco Malfoy doesn’t _breathe_ without Lucius Malfoy’s permission. And that hasn’t changed even though Lucius is so many years dead. He has a portrait of him in a private room that he visits and asks for advice at least once a week.”  
  
According to Ms. Greengrass, Mr. Malfoy considers himself a Malfoy first and an individual second. “He sees himself as the heir of many, many people who were all more talented and powerful than he is,” is the way that she puts it.  
  
“And that leaves him unable to appreciate different qualities in _anyone,_ even someone who is as much like him as my son is,” she finishes, and then leans back and looks into my face, proud and poised and still sorrowful.  
  
“I would have been able to live with him if his worship of his father had been a tenth less blatant,” she whispers. “I know that many pure-bloods of our generation were raised to think of fathers, or at least parents, that way. But—it was _too much._ There’s too much of it in his life for me to think that he’ll ever recover.”  
  
And that is the powerful truth that Ms. Greengrass leaves us with, as readers: that the shadows of the war can still linger in someone’s soul when the war is years over, and leave them unable to recover.   
  
*  
  
Draco leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them and spread the paper out in front of him, fanning it on the table.  
  
Yes, that was the truth he had feared she would tell. Exposing his heart on the page to someone else, to many people, when Draco had striven to keep his emotions private for so many years. Especially, talking about his visits to his father’s portrait, which had diminished since the divorce and the way that Scorpius had grown away from him. Draco had been too afraid that he would flinch from the painted silver eyes looking at him with condemnation.  
  
But…  
  
It hurt less than he had expected. Seeing it in print, it looked more like Astoria’s petty attempt at revenge than anything else. Draco even wondered how many people would believe it, and for years, he had been certain that everyone would the instant it got out.  
  
Perhaps he had exaggerated the horror of the knowledge, however. Perhaps the fact that he was a coward and had entered the war only over threats to his family was true of other people, too.   
  
Perhaps Potter would not be surprised by anything except the specific details, like the visits to the portrait and the fact that Draco had told this to Astoria on their wedding night. Draco had told her then because he thought she deserved to know that she wasn’t marrying one of the great Malfoys of the past.  
  
And she had looked at him with uncomprehending eyes at the time, hadn’t she? She had reached out and put her hand on his head, and then shaken her own and drawn him down into the blankets, into the storm of emotions that were as uncomfortable as all the other feelings and sensations in their marriage had been for Draco.  
  
It was…  
  
It was something that he had protected for years as a secret weakness, the same way he had protected expression of the emotions that Scorpius and his divorce in general had made him feel. But seen from the outside, was it so horrible? He knew Astoria had used it as a weapon because she wanted to stop him. She would be watching for the effect on Draco more than for the effect on their enemies.  
  
And there were those who would try to use it as a weapon, especially pure-bloods who thought that Draco’s cowardice and pathetic nature were unfitting of the heroic legacy of the Malfoys. But there were other people who wouldn’t think it was unforgivable. Even the interviewer, Draco thought, reading it over again, had sounded puzzled towards the end of the article, as though wondering why Astoria’s revelations were so terrible. She had used the same words more than once, and tried to spin the worst details into something thicker, as though working with thin material.  
  
 _Other people might only see that as normal._  
  
It was like turning to face a nightmare and finding that it was the shadow a much smaller creature had cast on the wall. Draco sat there, shivering, cold sweat on his forehead, and he wasn’t sure if that came from the force of the revelation or the fear that he had felt when he began reading the article.  
  
Either way, it was an emotion that he wasn’t feeling right _now_.  
  
Either way, it was an emotion that he doubted he would ever feel again.


	15. A Shadow of Wellness

  
“You didn’t know about this.”  
  
Hermione’s voice was stiff and strained. Harry leaned back in his chair and took another sip of the pumpkin juice that Kreacher had insisted on preparing for lunch. He had muttered something about it being homely and reassuring when Harry asked him, and Harry reckoned that he could use that right now.  
  
But not for the same reasons Hermione could, or _thought_ he could.  
  
“No,” he said, setting the glass down and reclaiming the paper from where Hermione had strewed it on the other side of the table in her agitation. “But what does it matter? It’s nothing I couldn’t guess about him. He sounds as though he’s been more together living under his father’s rule than I was after my leg was injured.”  
  
Hermione paused, emotions struggling beneath the surface of her face. Then she said, “But that was different. You’d just been hit with something devastating, something a lot of people would have crumbled beneath—”  
  
“And something a lot of people would have stood up under better than I did,” Harry finished softly. “This article doesn’t harm us much, Hermione. The ones who were going to despise Draco because of this already do. And everyone else should see that this is a harmless secret, as far as secrets go. What did Astoria hope to do with it, except to slow Draco down and make him feel two centimeters tall?”  
  
“I’ll concede she shouldn’t have gone to the paper,” Hermione said, unfolding her arms. “But what if she has something else to say, something that could damage us more? And he still should have told us about it if he knew that she would go to the papers. And since when have you started calling him Draco?”  
  
Harry laughed. “Which question would you like me to answer first?”  
  
It took a minute, but then Hermione smiled sheepishly and said, “All right. I should talk to Malfoy if I want to know the answers to some of those questions, I know. But—when did you start calling him by his first name?”  
  
“When I started thinking of him as human,” Harry said. “Don’t worry, he’ll be as surprised as you were.” He leaned forwards and caught her eye. “I don’t think we ought to worry about it right now, because that’s exactly what Greengrass wants us to do. Instead, we should plan our next meeting, the one where we reveal some of the specific information about what the pure-bloods are doing to the magical creatures and what that’s doing to their families. And I want to hold it at Hogwarts.”  
  
Hermione blinked, then flushed, then paled. It was the reaction Harry had thought she would have, and as he had also foreseen, it knocked her quite neatly off the rails of her reaction to Malfoy. She paused, cleared her throat, and then said, “I don’t know that we can make it work this soon, Harry.”  
  
“ _You_ can,” Harry said, and he believed that.   
  
Hermione’s face turned pink with pleasure. She spent a few minutes thinking, then nodded. “Maybe I can,” she said. “Excuse me, please. And _do_ tell Malfoy that I want to speak with him,” she added, before she rushed out of the kitchen.  
  
Harry leaned back and shut his eyes. Working on soothing the feud between Hermione and Malfoy was still wearing to him. Maybe a nap would be a good idea…  
  
But he shook his head stubbornly and sat back up. No, he had come too far to yield to his weariness every time it tried to conquer him. Instead, he would think about what he could do next, whether he should talk to Draco or firecall someone else, or go back to writing letters to the Muggleborns whose names Hermione had left with him.  
  
 _Draco first. It would do him good to know that someone cares._  
  
*  
  
Draco started when the fire in the hearth came to life. Someone was trying to call him, and he hadn’t expected that. He had thought the Howlers would come first from the pure-bloods who had read Astoria’s article and despised him now.  
  
But he leaned forwards and cast the charm that would give the caller permission to speak to him, because courage had to start somewhere.  
  
He hadn’t expected Potter’s head to form out of the fire, either. And he hadn’t expected the enormous _smile._ Draco smiled back hesitantly, then blinked and shook his head. “Are you really Potter?” he had to ask.  
  
“Yes, of course I am,” Potter said, with the same lack of surprise that he had shown about most of this process so far. “I saw the article this morning. I want you to know that I don’t think it’ll change much. The only ones who should care for what Astoria says are the pure-bloods who already hate you for collaborating with a Muggleborn and someone like me.”  
  
Draco nodded. It was reassuring to hear those words from someone else’s mouth, despite everything. “Thank you. Is Granger angry?”  
  
“Only that you might have known about this and not told us. And she does want to speak with you,” Potter said, and met his eyes, and waited.  
  
“Astoria had threatened me,” Draco said. “Perhaps I should have informed you, yes. However, her condition for not going to the papers was that I back off and drop my support of your— _our_ cause. I would not agree. And she told me exactly what secrets she was going to reveal.”  
  
“Nothing else that you told her and she might be keeping in reserve?” Potter gazed at him thoughtfully through the flames.  
  
“Not a chance,” Draco said. “I didn’t tell her any secrets about money or the Malfoy business affairs. And while she could collaborate with Scorpius to come up with something else embarrassing, I’m sure, such as how my son and I have argued, there’s nothing that would bring me down with a personal threat.”  
  
Potter nodded. “Good. Then I want to think about arranging a meeting at Hogwarts of the same kind as the meeting we had in front of my house, except this time we’ll talk in more detail about the theory. Can you be ready for that fairly soon?”  
  
Draco blinked. He wished for a moment, for the first time, that Granger was there, because he could have used someone to commiserate with over Potter’s abrupt changes of subject and the way that he seemed to leap madly into a whole new project.  
  
“I’m not sure,” he settled for saying, because half the things he wanted to yell at Potter, Potter wouldn’t understand, anyway. “I still haven’t received responses to all the letters I sent out. Perhaps they need more time to think about things.”  
  
Potter nodded briskly. “But I _am_ getting responses, and most of them are telling me that they won’t know how to act until they have more information. And I think we can safely start spreading the more complicated bits of the theory out there, now. If someone is knowledgeable enough to come up with objections that you and I haven’t foreseen, well.” His grin flashed. “That’s one problem settled.”  
  
Draco smiled back because it was impossible not to. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll ready the notes. You spread the word. Dibs has told me that she’d like to speak to you again. Do a nice interview for the _Prophet._ ”  
  
Potter rolled his eyes. “Of course you would assign me the task that I’d hate most,” he said. “At least Hermione is going to take care of informing the Muggleborns. And I’ll talk to Neville. He’ll be the best one to arrange for us using the space. Between us, we should be able to organize this.” He started to pull his head back.  
  
“Why Hogwarts?” Draco asked, the less pressing of the two questions that had occurred to him, before Potter could shut the Floo.  
  
“Because it’s central to the life of the wizarding community,” Potter said, and choked on laughter when Draco glared at him. “That _did_ sound like something Hermione would say, didn’t it? But it’s true. The children we’re fighting for are the ones who attend Hogwarts, and the ones who will go there in the future. I think they should have a chance to hear the same kinds of things that their parents will. And it makes for a convenient excuse for me to visit my two youngest. And for you to see Scorpius. If you want to.”  
  
“And you know that it makes it easier for him to ambush us, as well?” Draco asked.  
  
Potter cocked his head. “He can try that,” he said. Draco listened to the deadly calm in his voice and shivered a little as something like a needle of ice pierced him. “I don’t think he’d try it more than once.” Potter turned his head then, listening to something Draco couldn’t hear, and snorted. “Unless you have any other tactical considerations, I’ll have to go. Ron is trying to knock down my front door.”  
  
“Why did you decide that you would rather believe my side of the story than Scorpius’s and Astoria’s?” Draco spoke the question before his good sense could intervene and demand he take it back. “You’ve known Scorpius better, and for a lot longer.”  
  
“I like Scorpius,” Potter said, as if Draco had accused him otherwise, eyes locked on Draco’s. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t see his flaws. As long as he just talked about you trying to obstruct his life in typical teenage fashion, well. I’m sure that Al says the same things about me sometimes. But he was so insistent that you were lying and running some long-range plan on me, that you _couldn’t_ care about pure-bloods, and that makes me think that he doesn’t see all of you. The article made me think about your wife in the same way.”  
  
It wasn’t the ringing endorsement that Draco had imagined he would get, and it wrongfooted him in the same way that his response to Astoria’s article had. But he was able to blink his eyes, and say, weakly, “Oh.”   
  
“Yes,” Potter said, and graced him with another smile before he disappeared.  
  
Draco leaned back and stared at the ceiling, and thought about that. Then he shook his head. He needed to organize Potter’s notes and make the final decision about whether to keep his messy handwriting or not, and the meeting at Hogwarts would be fairly soon. That meant he needed to _move._  
  
It was only when he was deeply involved in the process of copying the notes out that he realized what had been nagging at him all through the conversation with Potter. The git hadn’t been sitting in a chair, the way he had for almost every conversation he’d had with Draco, and especially the ones over the Floo.  
  
He’d been _kneeling._  
  
Draco rushed back to the fireplace and threw Floo powder at it, but despite his use of whole handfuls, nothing changed; Potter’s Floo was closed to visitors and likely to remain so. That drove Draco back to copying out the notes, at last, but in a fuming, stamping way that he was sure Potter had incited on _purpose._  
  
But that made something new and bright burn in him, to think about.  
  
His potion had _worked._  
  
And Potter thought Draco someone worth teasing with bits of information, the way that he did with his friends.  
  
That made Draco start to smile, and no matter how much he bit at his lips and told himself to be stern, that an unexpected reaction to Astoria’s article shouldn’t affect how he let _Potter_ affect him, the smile came anyway.  
  
*  
  
Harry was glad that Ron got to be the first one he showed the new change to. His reaction would be gratifying in a way that Hermione’s wouldn’t, because she had always been sure that Harry could recover, if he only put his mind to it, or researched harder. She had taken it hard when Harry gave up on searching for new solutions from Healers.  
  
But the way that Ron’s mouth dropped open when Harry opened the front door himself and faced him standing on two legs drove all those thoughts out of Harry’s head. Harry grinned at him, and waited.  
  
Splutter, splutter, incoherent gasp, and then Ron came out with the right words. “Mate,” he whispered, his body shaking with something that Harry knew was delight, not spasms, no matter how much they might have looked like them. “You’re _walking_.”  
  
And then he lunged forwards, which Harry had to turn to prevent, because if he’d caught Ron full on they would have both gone down. Leaning his weight on the wall, he caught his best mate by the shoulders instead and laughed. “Not quite,” he said. “Not for very long. Draco’s potion can’t work miracles. But I knelt down this morning, and walked unassisted all across the ground floor. I’m going to try the stairs next.”  
  
Ron stared at him, and then laughed aloud. “ _Draco_?” he said, and “ _Kneeling_?” and Harry knew which was more important to him, despite the one he’d started with.  
  
Harry nodded, smiling. He could already feel the returning twinges of pain in his knee, but even a pain-free hour or so was an improvement over what he could be sure of with the potions he’d been using already. “Yes to both. I think I could use someone to watch my back while I’m on the stairs, though. Can you do that?”  
  
Ron leaned back, arms folded, grinning. Harry winked at him and turned to face the stairs.  
  
He didn’t try to hop, because that would only jolt the knee to no good purpose, and it had never worked even during the times when he felt best a few months after the torture. Instead, he carefully bent his good leg and placed the foot flat on the stair, hauling himself up. Then came the bad knee, and he bent it as delicately as though he was underwater and didn’t want to scare some rare species of fish away.  
  
The imaginary water thrashed around him, Harry’s sight wavered from how intensely he was concentrating, and the knee completed the bend and his foot came down flat. Harry was standing two steps up from the floor, with less effort than he’d had to use since the Healers originally gave up.  
  
He turned his head and grinned at Ron. Ron nodded back, the smile deeper in his eyes than on his face now, and crossed the room to touch Harry on the shoulder, careful of his balance.  
  
They stood there like that for a little while, and then Harry shook his head to wake himself up from the happy dream and said, “So, what did you come here for? I know it must have been something more important than to admire the way Draco’s potion worked.”  
  
“No, it wasn’t,” Ron said.  
  
Harry closed his eyes and reached up to clasp his best mate’s hand.  
  
Ron let a few more minutes pass in silence before he said, “I contacted Neville, and he agreed that we could meet on the grass in front of Hogwarts. He can persuade the other professors around. Most of them have good opinions on the idea that pure-bloods might have to change their treatment of magical creatures, anyway.”  
  
Harry nodded. He had thought that would happen. A centaur taught Divination at Hogwarts again, and a woman with more goblin blood than Flitwick had taken over Care of Magical Creatures. It was hard to avoid changing your mind about people of other species when you worked beside them day after day.  
  
But…   
  
“I thought I was going to be the one contacting Neville,” he said.  
  
Ron spread his hands and looked innocent. “Can’t a bloke help his best mate? It’s just something I could do, and wanted to.”  
  
Harry cocked his head. “Yes, a bloke can help a best mate, but _you_ can’t get that look on your face unless something’s happened. What did? And why did you feel that you had to talk to Neville to make up for it?”  
  
Ron sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “I really would feel better discussing this if we were sitting down, mate.”  
  
It was a transparent dodge, but Harry nodded and allowed it, carefully proceeding up the stairs with Ron behind him. By the time they were sitting down in the drawing room where Harry had spent most of his research time, his knee felt as if it was on the verge of freezing again. Harry leaned back in the chair and wondered when Draco would have time to brew more of the potion, and if there was anything in it that was addictive.  
  
Ron spent a few minutes fidgeting with his teacup—Harry had allowed Kreacher to bring that, since he was on the verge of going mad with nothing to do—and then looked up at him. “Hugo has decided to join the people who are on the opposite side,” he said. “Like Astoria Greengrass, and so on.”  
  
Harry blinked. Well, he couldn’t say that he hadn’t expected it. Hugo wanted to make Harry feel as bad as he did, somehow, about not taking the experimental Healing therapies that could have meant losing his leg or his magic. “How is he doing that?” he asked. “There’s not much a sixteen-year-old can do to affect the outcome, I don’t think.”  
  
Ron grimaced. “He’s telling everyone in Hogwarts who will listen about how you’ve gone a little mental and spent too much time with old books. I think people are listening to him because he’s still known as Harry Potter’s favorite nephew, and it’s an explanation that a lot of people see as making more sense than that you’re a new magical researcher who came up with an innovative theory.”  
  
“That’s the one that doesn’t make sense to _me_ ,” Harry pointed out dryly.  
  
Ron nodded. “Anyway, he might well appear at that meeting you’re going to have at Hogwarts and yell at you. I wanted you to be prepared.”  
  
Harry thought about that for a little while, watching the gentle drizzle outside. He imagined it coursing down the windowpanes that Kreacher would then grumble about cleaning, and the way that it would fall into and barely disturb the stagnant pond in the back garden. The rain fell everywhere, and didn’t care about what it touched.  
  
Then he reached out and took Ron’s hand again. “Thank you for the warning,” he said. “And for contacting Neville. But it’s really not your fault. Hugo has to make his own choices and decisions, and if he shows up, I’ll deal with it.”  
  
Ron nodded, relief rising off him like steam off the pond. He changed the subject then, and Harry leaned back and let him take the conversation over.  
  
Part of him throbbed gently in shame, that he had raised a subject and a theory in the first place that was tearing the Weasley family apart.  
  
But, in reality, that bitter wound was more than two years old. Perhaps they even stood a chance of purging it, if Hugo confronted him and spewed his bile where other people could hear it. Maybe that would be enough of a blaming session for him.


	16. Blaming Sessions

  
_Chapter Sixteen—Blaming Sessions_  
  
“You’re sure that this is going to be comfortable?”  
  
Harry fell into the chair and grinned up at the hovering Hermione. “Yes. Of course. Why not?” He extended his leg in front of him, along the padded stool that Hermione had conjured, and stretched luxuriously. His muscles throbbed for a moment, his knee seemed to lock, and then the components that were freezing up melted back into fluidity. Harry shook his leg out and groaned.  
  
“That doesn’t sound comfortable,” Hermione said, watching him.   
  
Harry opened his eyes and shook his head. “Compared to what it would have felt like before? It’s wonderful.”  
  
Hermione bit her lip and danced anxiously in place. “I just want you to feel as good as you can,” she whispered.  
  
Harry patted her hand. “And I appreciate that,” he said, “but Draco’s potion really is working.”  
  
“A shame that you couldn’t tell Draco that.”  
  
Harry looked up. Draco was climbing the steps to the platform that Neville, along with a few of the other Hogwarts professors, had built for them in front of the school gates. His face was pale, his lips pinched, and his hands swung in fists at his side. He stalked directly over to stand in front of Harry and glare at him, in a way that Harry knew meant he was more focused on Harry’s leg than the speeches they were to give today.  
  
And that was a problem.  
  
Harry clenched his hands on the arms of the chair and dragged himself to his feet, nodding to Hermione. “Would you go and make sure that there are enough chairs for everyone?” he asked. “People would be more comfortable sitting on the grass than on the streets in front of my house, but I’d still like most of them to have a place to sit.”  
  
Hermione raised her eyebrows in a way that said she found his dodge unworthy of someone like him, but turned away and walked towards the edge of the platform, dropping easily to the ground. It wasn’t that high up, really, just high enough that Harry needed stairs or a ramp to get up.  
  
And Draco, too, he noticed with interest as he limped towards the edge of the platform. Or did he think it wasn’t dignified for someone his age to run towards the platform and take a flying leap onto it?  
“I did try to firecall you,” Harry told him. “The elves said that you were in the lab and mustn’t be disturbed. And I owled you.”  
  
“You only tried once,” Draco said, glaring at Harry’s leg in a way that said he found it easier to look at that than at Harry’s face. “And you could have mentioned it when you were _kneeling_ in front of the fireplace to talk to me and I didn’t think about that until later.”  
  
Harry sighed. “Sorry. I had the stupid idea that you’d prefer to figure it out yourself from seeing those clues. When you didn’t, I thought you hadn’t noticed, and then your owl told me you had and I confirmed it. But why does it make you so angry?” he added, because Draco still strode along past the chairs on the platform with his jaw locked and his eyes set stubbornly straight ahead. “I gave you all the details I could.”  
  
Draco spun to face him and leaned in. Harry hoped, for the audience already filtering amongst the chairs, that it would just look like they were having an intense debate about how to present their research, and not a row. A row would undermine their stability in the eyes of most of those watching them.  
  
“I wanted to see it from the beginning,” Draco said, and Harry could hear the sound of his jaw grinding, as though it was a millstone. “I wanted to touch it and estimate how much pain it would bring you. Instead, you keep handing me these _excuses._ Why not open your Floo in the days between the last time we spoke and sending me the owl?”  
  
“It was,” Harry said, blinking. “Unless I did something wrong with the spells right after I talked to you. That’s happened before. I don’t realize it’s closed because a lot more people visit me or owl me than try to firecall me.”  
  
Draco snorted bitterly, his mouth closed, and turned his back. “I wanted to examine the progress of your knee,” he told the sky. “It’s a lost cause now. I won’t know exactly what the bone looked like, or the damage, when it began to heal.”  
  
“You can’t use a reverse _Tempus_ Charm?” Harry asked. “That was what we did sometimes when we didn’t know how a corpse had got a wound. It can’t show you who inflicted the damage, because people are too complicated to show, but it turns back time and shows you the interaction of objects,” he added, as Draco pivoted slowly to face him.  
  
“Then why didn’t you use it to look at the damage the warlocks inflicted on your knee in the first place?” Draco asked, his voice low.  
  
Harry smiled grimly. “They used their wands, not any objects. They were careful of that. And I…couldn’t look at the images at first, the ones the Healers managed to pull up.” He swallowed and turned his head away, shuddering as he closed his eyes. The memories were waiting there, vivid in their black and red colors if he wasn’t careful. But he was, and bent himself to ignoring them. “They were too grotesque.”  
  
“ _You_ couldn’t face something?”  
  
Harry glanced back at Draco and smiled. “This serenity that you see on my face?” he asked, gesturing to his body. “It was hard-won. It took me a year to accept what had happened to me, another six months to start working towards cheerfulness instead of despair all the time. And no, I couldn’t face the images. But some of the Healers might still have them on record in Pensieves. They didn’t help _them,_ but you’re brilliant enough to figure out from them what the knee looked like three days ago, I think.”  
  
*  
  
Draco _hated_ the way he would brace for one particular kind of disagreement with Potter and Potter would then turn around and say something complimentary or stupidly sweet and leave Draco feeling like a cad for wanting to disagree.  
  
He hated it so much that he glared at Potter and said, “Fine. I’m going to take you up on that offer. And the reverse _Tempus_ Charm, in a few days.”  
  
Instead of paling the way he would have if he had made an offer he never intended to confirm, Potter smiled and said, “Good. Now. We agreed that you should present the majority of the notes, because she would make them sound abrasive and I don’t understand all the relevant theory. What are you going to start with?”  
  
Draco stared at him some more, and then shook his head and decided to move forwards. From now on, he would present a confident front. It was particularly necessary with his son, and perhaps Astoria, among the people watching him. He would let Potter and Granger do what they wanted as long as it didn’t interfere with him. That should serve to show them that he was cooperating.  
  
“I’m going to start with the laws that you discovered about house-elves, and how they affected family size when they were legal,” he said coolly. “That was the proof that I found hardest to accept, and does show that we can do certain things to affect the birth of children in a _positive_ way.”  
  
Potter watched him thoughtfully, then nodded. “Good. Then—”  
  
“You’re _walking_.”  
  
The stunned voice came from near their feet, off the platform. Potter turned, and Draco turned a moment after him. He could recognize the tone in the voice, if not the voice itself. He didn’t want to deal with any more Weasley prejudice at the moment, and he also, oddly enough, didn’t want that for Potter. He had too much work to do with soothing Granger’s irritation as it was.  
  
The boy who stood there was perhaps a few years younger than Scorpius, and with a pointy face that Draco was more used to seeing reflected in family portraits than the real world. His hair was red, of course, and his eyes brown and tragic. He had his arms folded, his face set in a sulky cast that he seemed to think was the same thing as real masculinity or power.  
  
“Hugo,” Potter said quietly. Draco connected the name in his mind to the Weasley family tree he had spent hours staring at when first researching Potter’s theory. Granger and the original Weasel’s son. “I hoped that you would be pleased by that. Isn’t it what you wanted from me?”  
  
Draco learned far more than he wanted to about Potter, and about his relationship with this young idiot, from the tone in Potter’s voice when he spoke those words. Draco shifted his weight to the side, ready to spring if needed, ready to speak if needed. It was obvious that words from this Weasley would only tear wounds open in Potter, at a moment when they needed his mind on the upcoming meeting.  
  
“You could have told me,” Hugo said, and his face was turning incandescent. Draco curled his lip, not caring who watched him and might carry tales of a breach between him and Potter. Someone with red hair would never wear anger gracefully. “You could have said that you _were_ , rather than just making me think you’d given up. You never used to give up! You were the one I trusted the most!” Now he was shouting at Potter, his neck muscles bulging out in a way that made Draco watch hopefully for an attack of apoplexy. It seemed it would not happen, however, because in a moment the red shade faded and the boy stepped back and laughed, not seeming to notice that he hadn’t left enough time for Potter to answer.  
  
“I should have known,” he said. “You have time for everything else except me. Mum and Dad probably knew, and this git, and Al and Lily, but not me.” And then he turned his back after that, to Draco, incomprehensible speech and stomped away with his shoulders bristling with indignation.  
  
Draco turned his head and raised his eyebrows. Potter wasn’t watching him, though, instead staring sadly after the brat, and Draco found himself unduly upset that his attempt at silent communication had been ignored.  
  
“Would you care to tell me what _that_ was?” he asked, pricking his words with ice to catch Potter’s attention.  
  
Potter blinked and seemed to come to life again, facing Draco but leaning one hand on the back of a chair as though tired—though he hadn’t shown any signs of weariness before now. The other hand came down to rub at his knee. Draco caught his wrist and stared at him. Potter blinked back.  
  
“Are you truly in pain?” Draco asked. “Or have you convinced yourself you are because of the ministration of our resident arse?”  
  
Potter blinked again, and then smiled. It wasn’t the smiles Draco was used to seeing redefine the universe around him, but it was pleasant nonetheless, pleasant enough to make him smile back.  
  
“It’s what he says,” Potter murmured. “I was his hero, the one who could do no wrong. Then I was wounded, and I didn’t get up and go charging right back into Auror life. And I _also_ didn’t accept the experimental treatment that might have cost me my leg and my magic. He couldn’t forgive me for that.”  
  
Draco stared at him. Then he said, “Compared to that, my disagreements with my wife and son sound like the height of wit and maturity.”  
  
Potter’s laughter spilled out, and he transferred his hold on the back of the chair to Draco’s shoulder instead. “They do, don’t they?” he asked, shaking his head. “This is the way that Hugo is. I had hoped he would be happy when he saw me up and about, but…I should have realized he would find some way to twist it to fit his reality, where he can blame me.”  
  
His voice was sinking again, the smile dying. Draco shook his shoulder. “Yes, you should have, and you should stop worrying about him and letting him affect your mood. Here comes our audience.” People were walking up the road from Hogsmeade, Apparating into the designated points outside the gates, and sweeping out of the school with a series of small cheers for the diversion, and plenty of chatter.  
  
“You’re right,” Potter said. “Like about so many things.” He nodded to Draco, and stepped towards the central chair on the platform. Draco followed him, hands full of notes and mind full of memories.  
  
*  
  
Harry sat back in the chair and watched as Draco explained the theory, beginning with the laws that had influenced the way that the Ministry and most wizards behaved towards house-elves, and passing on to the other ways that someone could influence their family’s standing with the magic that had gifted them all, wizards and creatures, by such means as arranging treaties with centaurs or helping merfolk move to another lake. The examples were having the effect Draco’d hoped for, Harry thought. People were more inclined to listen when they thought it wasn’t hopeless, and that there wasn’t a certain change they would have to make or nothing. House-elves should still be treated properly, but they could ease the pure-bloods into it.  
  
Harry snorted, and was sure that his expression resembled the mixture of bitter and sour on Hermione’s face. They shouldn’t _have_ to compromise house-elves’ safety and good treatment this far. People should just do the right thing.  
  
But there was a difference between what people should do and what would actually work. And Harry wanted this to work more than he wanted to prove some obscure point of principle. He sat back, and listened.  
  
Draco had finished with the initial rush of questions, and was looking over the audience now while they gathered the breath or the thoughts for another round. And then a blond head rose into view in the front row, and its owner stood there, staring up at their platform with a still face that made Harry’s stomach curl.  
  
 _Scorpius._ He hadn’t been there a moment ago, or Harry would have seen him. Perhaps he’d been wearing a glamour or a Disillusionment Charm.  
  
“I have a question,” Scorpius said, his voice pitched to reach all the crowd. Harry saw Draco pale a little, but he didn’t look away.  
  
“What is that?” Draco’s voice sounded calm and normal, the same voice that he’d used to address everyone else. Harry had to admit that sometimes, pure-blood training in control of emotions might be useful after all. It certainly sounded as though Draco didn’t care that this was his son, or notice.  
  
“Why should we believe that you are doing what you say you are?” Scorpius folded his arms and swept all of them with the same gaze—except Hermione, whose eyes he couldn’t quite meet. “Only one of you has a reputation as a magical researcher and a fighter for the rights of magical creatures. _You_ know about Potions, and Mr. Potter knows about Dark magic and defensive countermeasures. But that doesn’t mean that he’s right, if his research is the initial reason you started looking at this. You could be wrong. Why do you think that we should change our whole way of life based on the opinions of one person who’s never done work in this area before?”  
  
There was a pause, and murmurs spread. There weren’t as many of them as Scorpius might have hoped, Harry thought, because he had waited until some people were convinced by the evidence before speaking. But some members of the audience would seize on this excuse to turn against the theory, and of course the papers would want to play the conflict between family members up.  
  
For the length of that pause, Harry thought Draco would simply stand there with his eyes fixed on his son’s, unable to move. But he smiled slightly now, and shook his head.  
  
“Many of you know my family,” he said, pitching his voice to the audience rather than Scorpius, which Harry thought a wise choice. “Many of you know the training that my father put me through, making me memorize and recite pure-blood genealogies, because many of you will have suffered the same thing. I consider myself an expert in pure-blood history as well as Potions. I recognize the importance of this theory and the many things it explains which cannot be ignored as coincidence.  
  
“More than that, however, many of you will remember Mr. Potter’s brilliant leaps of intuition that solved the problems he faced in Hogwarts and during his final confrontation with the Dark Lord. He didn’t know that he could survive the Killing Curse a second time, but he risked it, and it turned out he was right.” Harry stared at Draco, but he had to admit that was a brilliant reimaging of his final walk through the Forbidden Forest that wouldn’t have occurred to him, personally. “He’s trying, now, to bring another of those leaps to life.  
  
“And the self-admitted expert in magical theory and magical creature rights agrees with us.” Draco turned and extended his hand towards Hermione. “I think that’s worth something.”  
  
The moment paused again, and then surged past, as other people stood to ask other questions. Scorpius was the one standing pale and silent now, eyes on his father’s, and then he turned his back and stormed away.  
  
Few people watched him go.  
  
Draco was one of them, Harry noticed, but he didn’t spoil everything by going after him, either.  
  
And thatmade something ignite deep in Harry’s stomach, something that made him want to stand up and walk over, to just be near Draco.  
  
And _that_ made him think.


	17. Breaking the Opposition

  
“Master Draco!”  
  
The house-elf’s cry brought Draco bolting back to his feet. He’d spent most of the night in his Potions lab, working with exhilaration on another version of the potion, which ought to help Potter’s leg even more. He hadn’t discovered the solution yet, but it had excited him enough that he’d fallen asleep at a table in the lab rather than in his bed.  
  
Now he blinked, disoriented, and turned his head, looking from side to side, before he identified the house-elf standing in the lab door and wringing his hands.  
  
“Master Draco,” the elf whispered. “Mistress Astoria—she is _here_.”  
  
Draco swore sharply before he caught himself. It certainly made the elf jump. Draco couldn’t remember the last time he’d used words like that aloud. His father would have said that it didn’t become a Malfoy.  
  
But his father wasn’t here to help him, and the people who would be shocked to hear Draco openly express such emotion weren’t, either. Draco moved away from the table and towards the door, forcing the elf to step aside. “You said that she’s in the house?” he questioned crisply, cocking his head so he could keep the elf in sight as he paced up the corridor. “Which room? Did she enter by the Floo or by the front doors?”  
  
“The Floo, Master Draco.” The elf wrung its hands as it hurried along behind him. From experience, Draco recognized that it was about to bang its head against the wall.  
  
He didn’t really have time for this right now, but he reached out and cupped a hand around the elf’s forehead. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said softly. “She must have exploited some flaw built into the wards allowing her access, one I never removed.” From the way the elf blinked, it understood nothing of what he was saying. Draco didn’t care. “It wasn’t your fault. I don’t want you to punish yourself.”  
  
The elf blinked so hard its eyes watered, and squinted at this unfamiliar concept. Then it nodded. “Yes, Master Draco. Thank you, Master Draco.” Then it tried to squint down its long nose at its own mouth, as though it wondered where the words had come from.  
  
Draco smiled in spite of himself and turned around.  
  
Astoria stood at the end of the corridor, staring at him.  
  
Draco straightened up and waved the elf off with a motion of his hand, hoping absently as he did so that the magic that caused the pure-bloods’ lack of children wouldn’t take the gesture the wrong way. The elf scurried off, and Draco felt no more or less fertile than before, so presumably it was all right.  
  
“Why do you treat your servants like that?” Astoria’s voice was strangled. She put her hand to her neck as though her collar of diamonds was choking her, and closed her eyes for a moment.  
  
“What?” Draco turned his head to the side. “You think that I live to abuse and degrade house-elves?” He paused, but Astoria said nothing, so he continued. “Or you still can’t believe that I care about the cause I’ve come out of the Manor and done publicity for? How long is it going to be until you admit to yourself that I’m telling the truth, Astoria, and that I’m really allied with Potter?”  
  
Astoria shuddered and opened her eyes. “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “You’re trying to make yourself look good to Scorpius, so that he’ll consent to become your heir again and do what you want.”  
  
Draco snorted so hard that he could feel his hair ruffle around his cheeks. “Scorpius has never cared particularly about house-elves. Why would _this_ be the way to win his good opinion?”  
  
“Because you’re allying with the father of his best friend and pretending to care about Muggleborns by working with one,” Astoria said, but her lips twitched and she took a step backwards as she spoke.  
  
Draco shook his head. “Some things aren’t about Scorpius, Astoria. You can go on thinking that he’s the center of my life if you _want_ to. But that’s not the same as it being reality. And eventually, that’ll trip you up.”  
  
Astoria reached out and caressed the wall of the Manor for a moment, as though reminding herself about the marble and the smoothness. Her eyes never left Draco. She stood as if expecting an _attack,_ Draco realized, and blinked. He hadn’t ever threatened his ex-wife that way. She was the one who had gone on the attack, if anything, releasing that information about him to the papers and threatening him before she did.  
  
Maybe that was it. Maybe she had lived in opposition to him so long that she couldn’t conceive he wouldn’t want to fight her if she offered him the chance to.  
  
“You certainly cared enough about him being your heir, a short while ago, to threaten to sire another child,” Astoria whispered.  
  
“And now I know that that probably won’t work,” Draco said. “If I ever want another child, I need to fight for it. And you ought to be worried about _Scorpius’s_ heirs, too. If he can’t marry whom he likes, if he can’t marry anyone but a Muggleborn, then what will happen to him? Whether or not he knows it, I’m struggling to give him a free choice as much as anyone else who’s caught up in this.”  
  
Astoria’s mouth was unattractive when she sneered. Draco tried to remember back to the time when he’d approved of that, because expressions of contempt and disdain were among the few emotions it was all right to express openly, if you were a Malfoy. It was hard to remember the time when he had thought that with any conviction.  
  
“You don’t believe that,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t have scolded him as viciously as you did yesterday at that meeting.”  
  
Draco stared, then laughed. “That’s what this is about?” he asked, and felt confident enough to fold his arms and cross his legs and lounge back against the wall as he grinned at her, despite the fact that his hair was mashed flat from sleeping on the table and he probably didn’t smell too good, either. “Scorpius is a big boy, Astoria. You don’t have to fight every single battle for him. Did he ask you to?”  
  
A flush like sunrise deepened along Astoria’s throat, and she shook her head. “This isn’t over,” she said, retreating a step towards the fireplace that she must have come through.   
  
“This is _ridiculous_ ,” Draco countered, leaning forwards. Scorpius had the moods and the instability of a teenager, but Astoria had never been like that. She was the one who had demanded a divorce, and in retrospect, she had been right. Draco expected her to have some sense. “Think about it, Astoria. You may not want to believe that I’m sincere, but until the moment when I prove myself otherwise, why not just sit back and wait for me to fall? If you’re right and I can’t believe what I say I do, then I’ll inevitably betray myself. You know I’m not as subtle as a Malfoy should be.”  
  
Astoria went on staring. Draco met her eyes with no trouble. Astoria finally made a choked noise under her breath and flung up her hand as though she would throw a handful of dust at him, but it came down empty, the sharp, shapely fingernails curling into her palm.  
  
“Fine,” she whispered. “What you say makes sense. Though it gives me no _pleasure,_ I’ll sit back and wait for you to fall.”  
  
And she whirled and left the corridor in a swirl of skirts. Draco remained where he was. A moment later, he heard the _whoosh_ of the Floo swallowing her as she left—hopefully to head home and think about how stupidly she’d behaved.  
  
Draco allowed himself a moment to smile and revel in what he’d accomplished: making his son _and_ Astoria listen to him. That hadn’t happened in a long time, and although he doubted Scorpius had felt hurt enough to cry to his mother and enlist her on his behalf, it still meant that _she_ thought Draco’s words to their son were cutting and triumphant.  
  
Then he went to fix the oversight in the wards that had let Astoria in. As interesting as that confrontation had been, it wasn’t something he wanted to happen again.  
  
*  
  
“Master Teddy is being home, Master Teddy is being home…”  
  
Harry blinked his eyes open. It took him a moment to focus on Kreacher, who was bustling around his bedroom picking up the clothes that Harry had dropped on the floor yesterday. Ordinarily, Harry would have hung them up, but he had been too tired after all the questions the reporters asked him.  
  
Then he _heard_ what Kreacher was saying, and he felt as though his smile might split dry lips. He sat up and reached hastily for his dressing gown. “That’s what you’re saying, Kreacher?” he asked. “Teddy came home during the night?”  
  
“Master Teddy is being home,” Kreacher pointed out, stopping and speaking the words slowly to Harry, and then he turned and hurried out of the room. Harry surged up to follow him, then grabbed the bed and bent his head and swore.  
  
His knee had gone stiff again during the night, and the moments of twinging, tingling pain that Harry was getting now represented something that would get monumentally worse in a few hours, he knew. He’d probably overused it yesterday while Draco’s potion was still working and he’d felt so good.  
  
He hesitated, then decided that he’d used it enough in the past few days that the muscles wouldn’t atrophy with some careful use of Levitation and Lightening Charms now. A flick of his wand later, some incantations, and he floated out of the room, his leg surrounded and cradled by a cushion of air. He was glad that Hermione had made him work hard enough at directed _Mobilicorpus_ that he could use it himself and not depend on someone else to pick the way his body went.  
  
Harry floated into the kitchen, and sure enough, Teddy was seated at the table, hungrily eating an enormous pile of biscuits that Kreacher must have set in front of him. He jumped when he saw Harry, then laughed and grabbed him around the shoulders, spinning him in midair. Harry hugged his godson and pounded his back.  
  
“Finally got tired of Brazil?” he said, when he had enough breath to talk.  
  
Teddy pushed Harry gently into the chair across from him and then plopped down and leaned forwards. “Yeah.” He had a strip of shaggy brown beard on his chin. It was already dripping with bits of chocolate and crumbs. Harry grinned and nodded at it; Teddy wiped the crumbs away with an awkward motion but didn’t cast a Depilation Charm, the way Harry had assumed he would. “And of course I wanted to see you. Uncle Ron was writing to me more often than you were.” He cocked his head gently at Harry and raised his eyebrows.  
  
Harry shrugged. “Sorry. I got caught up in what we were doing.” He glanced at the enormous pile of letters on the kitchen counter, which included ones from Neville and Susan and several reporters from papers outside of Britain asking for an interview. “And I was taking a potion that allowed me to walk almost without pain.”  
  
Teddy’s mouth gaped open, revealing half-chewed food. Harry waved his hand, and Teddy shut it and chewed some more before he said, gulping the words out in the middle of a swallow, “Uncle _Harry_. Really? You—you can walk?” He looked entranced, and Harry felt a scrape of guilt that he hadn’t taken more time to write to Teddy.  
  
“Well,” he said. “Carefully. But yeah, I’ve done more walking in the past few days and yesterday at Hogwarts than I’ve done in a long time. I only used the spells this morning because I think the potion is starting to wear off.”  
  
Teddy leaped to his feet and waved one fist in the air, giving a whoop that he cut off quickly. That was because, as Harry well knew, it was turning into a howl. He smiled at Teddy and bit his tongue on the advice to explain things to Victoire _right now._ He didn’t think Teddy would welcome that, and since it was such a big subject change from what they were talking about, Teddy might think he had brought it up just to distract Teddy from talking about his pain.  
  
“You’re _wonderful,_ Uncle Harry,” Teddy said, with the earnestness that Harry remembered from when Teddy was eight and Harry had bought him his first broom.  
  
“I’m not the one who brewed the potion,” Harry pointed out in some amusement.  
  
“But you’re still wonderful, for taking it and taking the risk,” Teddy said. His eyes glowed as he looked at Harry, and Harry almost reared back. That was the way Hugo used to look at him…before. He had never realized that Teddy felt such clear hero-worship. At least he could give some thanks that it was more subtle than Hugo’s. “Do you know how many people would have just given up by now and decided that nothing would ever make them better? _Lots,_ that’s who. I’m so happy, Uncle Harry.” He reached across the table and caught Harry’s hand tight.  
  
Harry squeezed it, then let him go. “Draco Malfoy was the one who actually brewed the potion, so you ought to be thanking him instead.”  
  
“I will, I will.” Teddy put his hands flat on the table and shoved himself back from it again, because apparently he was too excited to sit still. “Do you think he’d like a new broom? Or, I know, a cloak made from the skins of Lethifolds?”  
  
Harry laughed outright. “I think—”  
  
Then he had it. His efforts to reconcile Draco and Scorpius hadn’t exactly had brilliant results so far, but Teddy was closer in age to Scorpius and his cousin, besides. Although they weren’t well-acquainted, since Teddy had been in Hogwarts when Al and Scorpius became friends, they certainly knew each other.  
  
That was something Harry could do, and that Draco might actually like.   
  
“Can you speak to your cousin Scorpius?” he asked. “Please? He really despises his father, to the point where he’s fighting against the way that we’re trying to promote good treatment of magical creatures, because he thinks that we’re all secretly duped by his father and Draco will destroy our movement in the future or something.”  
  
“Well, Scorpius was always a little stupid,” Teddy said casually. “Lighting yourself on fire because you were trying to turn yourself into a dragon—catch _me_ ever doing that!”  
  
Harry had to snort as he remembered the burned curtains that had resulted from that particular adventure, but he said, “He’ll never listen to you if you go after him with that attitude. Try, will you? Something a little gentler?”  
  
Teddy rolled his eyes. “Oh, all _right._ But it’ll depend on what Al thinks about the issue, too, of course. What does he think?”  
  
Harry winced as he remembered that he hadn’t really spoken to any of his children since he’d talked to Al through the fire. Jamie was out of the country, of course, and he had assumed Lily had a fight on her hands the way she always had, being Harry Potter’s daughter while he did something controversial and famous. His Lils could take care of herself.  
  
But Al—  
  
“I don’t know,” he said. “Honestly. I think he stands with his friend, and that would make sense. They only have a few months left at Hogwarts, and I know that Al and Scorpius plan to go into business together. But I wish that he’d told me one way or the other what he really thought.”  
  
Teddy gave him a triumphant grin. “Then I might have two cousins to trounce. I’m looking forward to that.”  
  
Harry sighed. “And maybe, in the middle of cousin-trouncing and trying to make them see sense, you might have the time to explain to Victoire why you won’t marry her?”  
  
“Wow, look at the time,” Teddy said loudly, his eyes fixed on the wall over Harry’s head. “If I’m going to catch Scorpius and Al in Hogsmeade, if this is even a Hogsmeade weekend, I should hurry.”  
  
And he hugged Harry once and banged out of the house like a whirlwind.  
  
Harry shook his head and turned back to the pile of post in front of him. There was only so much he could do for his children and nieces and nephews and godson, really, he thought. He would push what he could, and if he hadn’t invented a solution to the problems between Draco and Scorpius, then at least he had given Scorpius a distraction from them.  
  
He heard the Floo go off in the next room, and eased his way to his feet, smiling. He knew who that would be. Even the flames seemed to burst out of the fireplace with more enthusiasm when Draco called.  
  
 _And why do_ you _look forward to seeing him so much?_  
  
Harry knew the answer to that question. But, for now, neither question nor answer could help him; Draco would only panic if he knew what Harry thought. They had more important things to do.  
  
 _But later…_  
  
It gave Harry even more warmth than usual as he went to see what Draco wanted.


	18. Permission and Pardon

  
“You have the Pensieve memories the Healers constructed?”  
  
Draco kept his voice harsh, his head lifted. He had triumphed over Astoria this morning, but that feeling had faded as he worked on the potion. The way the ingredients went into the liquid seemed to twist under his hands, and he’d had to wear two bezoars against his skin this time in order to protect himself from the curse that warped his memories of the damage to Potter’s knee.  
  
That kind of savage hatred left him shaken. He wondered who Potter’s enemies like that could be, now that the Dark Lord was gone and Draco had become his ally.  
  
“Yes.” Potter reached for a basin behind him that resembled the standard Pensieve, but was twice as big. The way he leaned, he was going to drop it and the brimming dark liquid inside, so Draco stood up and moved around his chair to help him retrieve it. Potter smiled at him, and Draco’s stomach hammered briefly against his ribs.  
  
 _I will not permit this._ He wouldn’t be sick in front of Potter. His potion, if it did not work, was possible to rip apart and reconstruct. And the only other thing of note that had happened this morning, his conversation with Astoria, shouldn’t make him feel like this.  
  
“Why is the memory-liquid dark?” he asked, staring into the Pensieve, glad for a question he could ask that wouldn’t make him sound like a child, or reduce his voice to a squeak. “I’ve never seen a Pensieve that didn’t look silvery.”  
  
Potter shrugged. “The Healers told me that when so many memories are gathered together, they sometimes take on the color that fits the emotional mood of the people feeling them. Red for anger, and that kind of thing.”  
  
Draco sneered. “And I suppose these are dark because they felt so much sorrow that they couldn’t cure you?”  
  
Potter glanced at him. “No,” he said quietly. “Sorrow looks the color of a stormy sky. This is fear.”  
  
Draco narrowed his eyes, but said nothing more as Potter laid the basin on the low table in front of his chair and Draco leaned forwards, immersing his head into it. He felt a brief choking sensation, as though he had placed his neck into a garotte, and then the familiar disorientation that always accompanied his fall into a Pensieve.  
  
And then he stood, or floated, in front of a memory that was no ordinary memory at all, but a glimpse of what the Healers had seen when they used their spells to look at Potter’s knee.  
  
Draco’s eyes watered. If anything, looking at someone else’s memory was worse than looking at his own, or the real thing. He could make out the spell now, wheeling around him, snapping at the lines of thought that he tried to put together to link up the lines of damage and force them to make sense. Every time he established a connection, it stood a chance of being severed.  
  
Moving his hand slowly, feeling as though he fought currents circulating through the Pensieve, Draco laid his hands on the bezoars that he kept next to his skin.  
  
The bezoars flared with an arctic light he’d never seen before, and then fizzled out like stars. The spell turned towards Draco. He caught a glimpse of so many writhing dark lines that he flinched and flung up a hand in front of his face.  
  
The hand had an imprint on the palm, he saw. Something like a bezoar reversed, with an outline of the chain he had used.   
  
The lines attacked him—and faded. Draco could at least bend closer to this memory and study it, marking down the distances in his mind and noting how many small pieces of bone and joint had shifted over time.  
  
Then the memory became another one, and the spell was there again. Draco swore softly and clapped his hands on the bezoars at once, and this time, the effect that let him study the curse without having to fight the memory-eating seemed to last longer.  
  
He could only face one new one, however, because this time the curse attacked with renewed vigor, and Draco swore again and tugged his head out of the memories. He wheeled to face Potter, who blinked at him. Of course, he’d been sitting in his comfortable chair for the last—twenty minutes, Draco estimated, with a quick glance at the golden clock that stood on the table—and hadn’t been battling the magic lodged in his flesh.  
  
“Who were these enemies, who did this to you?” Draco demanded. “Because I’ve never seen someone hate another person so much.”  
  
*  
  
Harry grimaced. He hated to think about the things that had happened to him as the warlocks’ captive, and Hermione was convinced that that was what had delayed the healing in his knee. Face up to it, she argued, accept the damage, and he would remember more as well as be able to accelerate the healing.  
  
The urgent expression on Draco’s face was the first time that Harry had ever wished he’d taken Hermione’s advice.  
  
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “They took me suddenly and silently, and they never revealed their faces to me. I was rescued by chance, because Ron and other Aurors put clues together, and I think one member of the group broke and confessed that they had Harry Potter captive.”  
  
“You _think_ one member of the group confessed?” Draco’s eyes narrowed. He looked haughty and magnificent and far braver than Harry felt. Harry had to take a deep breath and remind himself about Astoria’s article. She had thought Draco weak enough, at one point, to be destroyed by the petty little truths she’d revealed. Draco was much stronger than his wife or son thought, but he wasn’t without fear, and Harry could relax in front of him, not have to defend himself.  
  
“Someone confessed,” Harry said. “I don’t think Ron and the others ever knew whether she was a member of the group or just a witness. They acted on the rumor, and rescued me. But no names, no faces, no concrete information.” His jaw ached from the memory of the teeth-grinding he’d done when he heard that. “I think I probably intruded into their business interests, somehow, in the course of my Auror work. I arrested an awful lot of people in illegal Potions brewing in the months prior to the capture. But that’s really all I know.”  
  
“So they could still be out there,” Draco summarized.  
  
Harry nodded, and tried to ignore the throbs coming from his knee. He knew that at least part of that was his own paranoia, not real physical pain.  
  
Draco bowed his head, lip caught between his teeth. Then he said, “The memory-erasing spell is the problem. I find it hard to tell what’s changed in your knee, and from what angle. I could put all the pieces together one by one and find out that way, but it’s taxing, time-consuming, and not something I can see devoting days to.”  
  
“Of course not,” Harry said, surprised that Draco thought Harry was suggesting that. “You’re brewing the potion for me, but you also have to continue living and working, and we have the theory about house-elves to spread.”  
  
Draco gave him a sharp look. It didn’t last, but it left Harry pierced like a needle and longing to know what lay behind that.   
  
_I want him._  
  
It was a weird thing to think, but true. Harry reminded himself again that there were more important things, though, and waited for Draco’s real response, other than the needle-sharp look.  
  
“I was thinking, I meant,” Draco said, words grinding like rocks, “of trying to remove the memory-altering spell altogether. Then I, or the other Healers who might look after your knee in the future, could at least watch the progress of our healing without losing our memories of the damage so far.”  
  
Harry winced a little. Then he said, “I hate to watch you put yourself in danger like that.”  
  
Draco turned his head to the side, and there was no mistaking the stiff line of his neck and shoulders. “You think I can’t do it.”  
  
There was no question in his voice, either. Harry found himself shaking his head and reaching out to touch Draco on the arm. “ _Not_ what I meant,” he said. “I think you can. But it’ll take a lot of time and effort, and don’t you have more valuable things to devote that to? It’s the same thing I said a minute ago. I don’t expect you to spend all that time on my knee. I didn’t expect you to spend what you have so far. I’m awed and grateful. That’s it. That’s the only thing.”  
  
This time, Harry got a softened expression and slightly opened mouth. He hoped that was a good thing. He smiled back, tentatively.  
  
*  
  
 _Stupid Potter._  
  
Stupid Potter to be confusing the issue and making Draco think about other things. He would have to pull back and reassemble his courage to tackle this if he thought too much about what Potter had said, so he lowered his head, cut the sight of Potter’s smile out of his field of vision, and coughed harshly. “Very well. You think I can do it, and I think I want to.”  
  
Potter hesitated, then nodded. That made Draco’s resolve firm again, because it was still possible that Potter doubted him. Doubt was easier for Draco to face than belief.  
  
 _And what a sad statement that makes about your life._  
  
Draco winced as that particular thought pierced deeply into him, and pushed the needle out by refusing to think about it. “I’m going to cast the spells that should reveal the memory spell to me,” he said. “I wouldn’t put it past people like the ones that you describe to have put in other curses that will hurt you when someone begins investigating the memory aspect. Are you prepared to face the pain?”  
  
Potter firmed his legs around his leg as he extended it. “Yes.”  
  
Just one word, no more, but looking at the man’s face, Draco found that he didn’t want to question that quiet resolve. He simply nodded, took out his wand, and crouched down beside Potter, fixing his eyes on the twisted lump of bone and flesh that made up his knee.  
  
He went through the same mental paring and stripping process that he used when he was brewing a complicated potion: he cut out of his mind all the excess distractions, the worries, the fears, the compelling plans for tomorrow. Then he reached out and laid his hands on either side of Potter’s knee. Even that light touch on the skin made Potter grimace.  
  
Draco paused. He had never been distracted before by the thought of someone else’s pain, even when brewing a potion that would cure someone by inflicting agony.  
  
Now, though, he had to breathe in, breathe out, and dismiss it. His fingers sank into the skin to maintain a firmer grip, and he began to speak the long incantation, Dark magic mingled with normal spells, that would show him the memory curse.  
  
The bezoars hanging on the silver collar around his neck burned against his skin. Draco took that as a sign that he was getting close to the curse itself, and continued speaking, his words tumbling fluidly around each other.   
  
The bezoars ignited with a hiss, and Draco smelled burning skin and hair. Potter’s hand reached towards him as if he smelled the same thing and meant to take the collar from Draco’s neck. Draco turned his head and pinned Potter with a look that was sufficiently hawk-like to make him stop reaching.  
  
Draco turned back and hissed the final part of the incantation.  
  
The air around Potter’s knee shook and blazed, and then unfolded itself to reveal the spell, looped and blue-green, a strangling snake. Draco looked at it and reached out, tracing a pattern around it with his wand.  
  
Potter screamed.  
  
The sound was shocking and ugly, nearly as ugly as the spell in front of Draco. Only long training kept him from flinching. Potions sometimes erupted as suddenly, or bubbled, or made noises, or ejected poisonous fumes. Draco had to keep his eye on the goal, and he didn’t allow his wand to move other than along the steady line he was using to trace the trap around the memory curse.  
  
Potter cried out again, but his knee didn’t pull back. That would have disrupted Draco’s spell for good, since the physical anchor of the memory curse was the knee, and Draco needed to weave his own curses all around it.  
  
He allowed one hand to lightly trail down Potter’s leg as he leaned forwards and began the third spell, which from the sound of it sent another bolt of pain through Potter.  
  
*  
  
The memories that Harry hated were back, pouring through his mind like thick sludge, reminding him of what the warlocks had done, how they had touched him, how they had hurt him.  
  
What they had whispered.  
  
 _No one will find you. No one will come for you. They don’t know you’re gone. By the time they find you, you’ll be a twisted lump of bloody flesh with only a mouth left, and you’ll beg for death. And they’ll be happy to give it to you._  
  
Harry hadn’t wanted to believe them, of course he hadn’t, but as time passed and no one came, it had become harder and harder to resist the suggestions. The words were twined with the other components of his reality, the slimy floor and the food and fluids forcibly spelled into his stomach and the spells wrenching his knee back and forth, even when the warlocks had left and shut the door behind them.  
  
Drowning in a world of hatred, he had forgotten how to hope.  
  
But there was hope here, and he remembered it with Draco’s light touch to his leg. He began to breathe again, and he reminded himself that the floor beneath him was his chair, and considerably softer than the floor of the cell where they had left him. He gulped and gulped, and some air made it into his starving lungs. He let his head fall to the side, and there was a pillow there.  
  
And Draco had begun to speak.  
  
It was the words of a last spell, but it was still a real voice and not an imaginary one, not a hostile one, and Harry reached out and grasped it. He used it as a line to hold onto as the pain sliced through him again, feeling as if it would disintegrate the bone that had struggled so long to stand up to it.  
  
Pain, and fear, and fury, and the light glimmer of comfort all the way through it. But Draco was there, and right now, Draco was a friend and a bulwark, and Harry clung to him for both salvation and sanity.  
  
*  
  
Draco closed his eyes, rested once more at the summit of his achievement, and prepared for the last stage of the battle. His trap glimmered all around the memory curse, various spells that were anchored to it now, and would rip its anchors in Potter’s knee free. Once it lost that site it was bound to, Draco thought, it _should_ dissipate altogether. It had only lasted this long because it had an object to twine around.   
  
But it would probably hurt Potter more than anything had so far, to lose something that had been such a large part of the complex of spells that made his life hell.  
  
“Potter,” he whispered. He heard a little whimpering grunt of acknowledgment, or chose to think that he had, and went on. “I’m going to take the memory curse off for good. But it’s going to _hurt_. I need to make sure that you want this, that this is something that you’re giving permission for.”  
  
He had never asked a question like that before. Of course, most of the time he didn’t know the people he was preparing potions for. They were at a distance. Not in front of him, gasping and sweating and straining.  
  
 _That wouldn’t have made a difference if it hadn’t been him._  
  
Draco examined the insight, nodded gracefully to it, and then placed it aside. Yes, perhaps that was true, but it couldn’t be allowed to have any impact on what he was doing right now. He exhaled, he inhaled, and he waited for the moment when he would hear Potter grant him permission or refuse.  
  
Silence. Then Potter said, “I trust you.”  
  
It was permission and pardon all at once. It filled Draco like a blast of light from a distant explosion, and he reached out and ignited the trap around the memory curse before the unexpected feeling could consume him.  
  
Potter’s wail as the curse was warped out of him had its triumphant side. Draco had to believe that.  
  
He opened his eyes when no sound followed it, and saw that his trap and the memory curse were both entirely gone. The bezoars were cool against his skin. Draco reached up to them as he glanced at Potter’s face.  
  
Potter had fainted, and he was white around the lips. Draco conjured a glass, cast _Aguamenti_ to pour water into it, and lifted the glass to throw the water on Potter.  
  
Then he hesitated.  
  
Then he set the glass on the table beside the chair and leaned over to shake Potter awake. Potter opened his eyes slowly, trembling, focused on him, and nodded.  
  
“Thanks.”  
  
Draco was full of light again.


	19. Flight of Pride

  
Harry sipped at his morning tea, glanced at the _Prophet_ to make sure there were no recent stories about him and Draco and Hermione, then pushed the table back so that he could look at his knee again.  
  
No. It still hadn’t changed from the last time he’d looked at it, five minutes ago. A lump of flesh and bone, not so attractive that Harry would have spent all his time peering at it if it wasn’t necessary.   
  
But when he spread out his hand and flattened his palm gently on top of his knee, no tingling pain answered him.  
  
Harry took a deep breath. Draco had told him that the latest dose of the potion should start working this morning, but also that removing the memory charm had caused some of the original damage to recur, so Harry should float himself to breakfast this morning. Harry had done as he advised, lounging in bed yesterday after Draco had gone and then casting the spells this morning that meant he could get down the stairs without touching the ground. He even had the leg stretched out in front of him now, on a stool under the table.  
  
It was this morning, though. And the longer he waited to test it, the more courage Harry thought he would need.  
  
He pushed himself back from the table, ignoring the rattle and rustle of the dishes on the edge, and managed to stand with a hop that tugged his leg off the stool.  
  
He waited for the pain, and then realized that he was standing with one hand on the table and one on the back of his chair, and he hadn’t actually placed the foot flat on the floor yet. He snorted and let it lower, moving his hands at the same time.  
  
Draco had been right. His foot floated down like a feather, and although his knee still felt heavy and awkward, a boulder strapped to the rest of his leg, there was no pain. Harry realized that he was trembling, his hands clenched, waiting for the agony to break out on him.  
  
And it wasn’t because he didn’t trust Draco. It was because he had lived with the pain for so long that to be without it seemed stranger than to have it happen. Waking up without it was like waking up to find that he had changed his bedroom in the night.  
  
He might be able to believe, though, as moment after moment passed and still nothing happened. He hopped another step forwards, and then forced himself to walk with his legs right beside each other and functioning in the same way.  
  
The pain was _gone._ Even the first dose of the potion hadn’t been that successful, calming and dulling the pain to the point that Harry hardly felt it, but letting it linger. And he had been able to walk and kneel and climb the stairs with that.  
  
What could he do with this?  
  
“Master is being stupid!”  
  
Harry glanced up, and smiled in spite of himself. Kreacher stood in the doorway of the kitchen, his arms folded, and glared at Harry as though Harry had been letting someone else cook for him. Harry shook his head. “No, Kreacher. It’s okay. Draco—you know him, the one who’s been visiting all the time—gave me a potion that let me walk without pain.” He _did_ remember that Draco had said he shouldn’t overdo it, since the cracks in the bone and flesh of his knee would still be there, and he could aggravate them if he went too far, but Draco couldn’t blame him for wanting to walk in his back gardens.  
  
Kreacher unbent a little. “Young Master Malfoy?”  
  
Harry rolled his eyes, smiling. “Yes, Kreacher. He made the potion for me, and he said that I could walk.” And there was something else that Harry yearned to do, although he knew that he would have to get away from Kreacher’s watchful eye before he got the chance.  
  
“Young Master Malfoy,” Kreacher repeated, almost under his breath, and looked up at the kitchen ceiling for a moment. Then he pointed a long, greasy fingernail at Harry and said, “Master Harry is following his advice. For half an hour.” He snapped his fingers, and a large, chiming golden clock appeared out of nowhere and hung in the air next to him. “Then Kreacher is coming to get Master Harry.”  
  
“Yes, Kreacher.” Harry tried his best to look properly chastened, though from the way that Kreacher eyed him, it didn’t work.  
  
“Master Harry,” Kreacher mumbled, and stamped off, back to his work. Harry immediately strode across the room and flung open the door to the garden.  
  
The back garden at Number Twelve Grimmauld Place was nothing much to look at, with the pond of stagnant water that Harry had spent so much time watching and the weeds that grew all over despite Kreacher’s devoted care. But it was also a place that Harry hadn’t spent much time in the last few years, and he wandered through it in delight now, picking up stones and carrying them along with him for the sheer pleasure of doing so. Once, even that minor added weight would have jostled his knee.  
  
But not now, and the glow and glare of weak sunlight on Harry’s head and in his eyes gave him still more to rejoice in. He kept walking until he glanced back and could see that he was out of sight of the kitchen window.   
  
The clock beside him chimed, and when he looked at it, Harry saw that he had twenty minutes left. He nodded. He hated to deceive Kreacher, but he knew the little elf would never let him do what he wanted to.  
  
And Harry _had_ to do it.  
  
He lifted his wand and whispered the Summoning Charm. A moment later, his broom was hovering beside him.  
  
Harry closed his eyes and spent a moment lightly breathing to get rid of the memories that would inconvenience him. Then he slung his leg, both his legs, over the broom and lifted his hands.   
  
The broom rose beneath him as gently as it had always done, as smoothly, and Harry bent his knee back along it with no sign of pain. He laughed, and the broom twirled in response. Harry clamped his hands down, and the broom shot up, and up, and up, until the air in Harry’s lungs ached and he had to remember that he wasn’t seventeen anymore.  
  
Not seventeen, but not dead, either. That was the most wonderful thing Malfoy had taught him, Harry thought, as the broom swirled and danced and kicked beneath him. That he could be out in the world, and although the damage to his knee would probably always be there, it didn’t need to be equally bad each and every day.  
  
He dipped and dived, and ignored the clock when it chimed beside him. There was wind in his eyes and wind in his ears and wind in his hair, and he was having too much fun to care what some rusty old timepiece said—  
  
“ _Master Harry!_ ”  
  
Harry winced. He felt like a scolded owl often looked, and he immediately landed in the garden beside Kreacher. The house-elf stared at him as if Harry had broken his leg, and Harry nodded to him.  
  
“Sorry, Kreacher,” he said. “But I needed to fly.”  
  
Kreacher’s chin quivered for a second. Then he reached out and flung his arms around Harry, with a loud sob. Harry blinked and patted the little elf’s back, wondering what the hell had got into him.  
  
“Master Harry is alive again,” Kreacher whispered.  
  
Harry tightened the clasp of his own hands, and ignored the way that Kreacher’s dirty ear-hair tickled his arms. This was better than any other ending to the flight, he thought, bowing his head and closing his eyes. Even being allowed to fly longer than he had.  
  
*  
  
Draco woke up in his Potions lab. This was becoming a tradition, he thought, stretching, and so was the frightened house-elf who hovered in his doorway, squeaking.  
  
“What is it, Orty?” he asked, tilting his head back and letting his throat flex as he yawned. Once, such showy, luxurious gestures would have been beneath him, beneath any Malfoy. But he was more than just a Malfoy, and he didn’t mind as much if other people around him thought so, too.  
  
As long as it didn’t interfere with his ability to negotiate with pure-bloods and help their work, anyway.  
  
“Master Scorpius is being here!”  
  
 _First Astoria, now Scorpius. That’s a tradition, too._ Draco stood up and gave the elf a smile that made it blush. “Bring him to me, please. I’ll be having breakfast in the long dining room.” And he strode past Orty, his head cocked and his steps firmer than they would have been a week ago if he had been told that he would need to confront his son.  
  
*  
  
He heard the distant sounds of argument, but if Scorpius was rowing with a house-elf, he would have better odds convincing one of the distant portraits to take pity on him. At least they might think that someone of their blood should have his own way. Draco continued eating the breakfast laid out for him, mostly kippers, and reading through the _Daily Prophet._ There was little that concerned him or Potter directly this morning, except an article about a donation Alicia Highfeather was making to set up a unicorn reserve. Draco smiled through the sourness of the last kipper.  
  
“Father.”  
  
Scorpius spoke that word so coldly. A short time ago, that would have hurt Draco, reminded him that his son thought he was worthless.  
  
Now he remembered that his son hadn’t been able to make him stop speaking or embarrass him in public, and he laid the paper down and gave his full attention to Scorpius. “You wanted to speak to me?”  
  
Scorpius jerked to a stop, his hands braced on either side of the curved doorway into the long dining room. Draco gestured to Orty, and the little elf snapped his fingers. In minutes, an empty plate and cup were standing next to a pulled-back chair, and a kettle had floated in to pour steaming tea into the cup. “Come and have breakfast if you want,” Draco added evenly. “You know that Orty will bring anything you like.”  
  
Scorpius swayed back and forth, kicking one leg. Draco watched two different kinds of pride struggle in him, and then he strode forwards and dropped into the chair. “I can’t stay long,” he said, haughtiness frozen on top of his voice like ice. “Al is expecting me back.”  
  
Draco nodded to him as he took another sip from his own cup. “You’re setting up your shop for your prank-selling business?”  
  
Scorpius, reaching for his cup, jerked his hand in a way that certainly would have made it spill if he was holding it. For the sake of the carpet, Draco was glad that he had moved a little slowly. “How did you know about that?”  
  
“Mr. Potter mentioned something, I think.” Draco cradled the cup of tea against his chest, and let the subtle warmth creep up his hands and arms. “Or you did, one of the times that Al visited. Anyway, I know that’s where your skill lies. You’re a fool if you don’t try to make something of it.”  
  
Scorpius straightened and let Draco see the underside of his nose. “Oh, so you think I’m a fool.”  
  
“Only if you don’t try to take advantage of your gifts,” Draco said. “And since it seems that you’re going to do that, I have no reason to think that you’re a fool. _Try_ to keep up, Scorpius.”  
  
Scorpius’s throat bobbed, and he seized the tea and dashed it down his throat almost savagely. He would have said something else, Draco was certain, but hot buttered scones appeared on his plate, and he had to content himself with gulping them. Butter got on his fingers. He licked it off, his eyes locked on Draco.  
  
Draco made only as much of a grimace as he would have if he were in a worthy restaurant and saw someone unworthy of being there, and turned back to the paper. Highfeather had told the fawning reporters that she simply wanted to preserve the beauty of unicorns for future generations, and it had nothing to do with what Draco and Potter promoted. Draco finished his tea, and wondered if he should contact Highfeather and allow her to boast at him. It might have some salutary effects, and keep her from taking anything out on Potter.  
  
“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”  
  
Draco blinked. He hadn’t forgotten Scorpius was there, but he hadn’t expected him to lead with a declaration so vague. “What on earth do you mean?”  
  
Scorpius flushed and pounded one fist on the table. But the long dining room was well-named, and the table fit the size. Scorpius’s plate trembled; Draco’s own dishes didn’t move. “I _mean_ that you have no idea what effect your little experiment is going to have on real people’s lives!”  
  
Draco let his eyebrows arch. “We hope it will improve treatment of house-elves. That sounds like a rather beneficial impact on the lives of real people.”  
  
Scorpius raked his hair up. It had red and gold streaks through it now, but Draco thought Scorpius could remove them if he wanted to. That meant Draco should tolerate them. Besides, they had more important things to argue about, he thought. “Not that! I mean that you don’t know what pure-bloods are going to do and say, just to make sure that they’re on the right political side in this debate.”  
  
“Better than some of the things they might have done and said,” Draco said. He let his voice drawl, feeling out the things Scorpius was talking about. He had no idea why Scorpius would be offended on the behalf of the prejudiced. He had thought Scorpius’s anger against the idea came from a grudge against Draco alone. “What do you mean?”  
  
“I mean that people are going to—they’ll bankrupt themselves trying to do something good for magical creatures, to have children.” Scorpius’s face had flushed all the way to the tips of his ears, which Draco remembered only seeing a few times before.  
  
“You don’t really believe that,” Draco said, and leaned his folded arms on the table. “Why don’t you tell me what you really believe?”  
  
Scorpius wavered back and forth. Draco expected him to storm out the door at any moment, his determination not to do anything Draco told him to do stronger than his desire to argue.  
  
Then he shook his head and blurted out, “I believe you’re lying to everyone, that you’re getting close to Al’s dad and using him for political advancement! You can’t believe what you’re saying you do! I’ve _heard_ you talk about—Mudbloods.” He hurled the word at Draco like a javelin.  
  
“I’ve said that,” Draco agreed. “But think about matters before you accuse me _without_ thinking, Scorpius. Do you believe that Granger-Weasley would work with me as long as she has if I was insulting her at every turn? And do you believe that I could control my bigotry if I was as bad as you thought I was?”  
  
“You despise Mr. Potter.” Scorpius’s eyes had almost vanished in his squint. Draco decided that he must be sure to mention, later, in another context, how ugly it made anyone who did anything like that.  
  
“I used to,” Draco corrected him. “But I think we work well together, and I’ve done enough experimental brewing for him to be sure of his gratitude.” He would not tell his son, no matter the pressure, about the trust that Potter had expressed in him. That was his private gift, and his alone.  
  
 _Gift? Are you not overvaluing it?_  
  
 _No._ Draco decided that then and there, but had no time to come to terms with the decision, because Scorpius was still rushing and rattling on.   
  
“You _couldn’t_ have changed your mind so quickly. You must be lying.” Scorpius had pushed his chair back and stood with his hands braced on the edge of the table. Draco was sure that he was one centimeter from forcing his finger down his throat and vomiting up everything he’d eaten that morning, just to show Draco that he didn’t need his fine fancy breakfasts.  
  
Draco shrugged, waited until Scorpius’s eyes had focused on him again, and said, in the mild tone that he knew would infuriate Scorpius the most, “Believe what you want.”  
  
Scorpius whirled and slammed out of the house. Orty squeaked and popped after him, probably to make sure that he didn’t damage the front door.  
  
Draco leaned slowly back in his chair. He thought for a moment of changing the wards to keep Scorpius out the way he had Astoria, but rejected the idea. Scorpius was still his son, his blood relative, and his heir, and would be welcome inside the walls of Malfoy Manor and the wards of his heritage whenever he liked.  
  
Whether or _not_ he liked.  
  
Smiling, Draco stood and moved in the direction of his lab. He had a congratulatory letter to write Highfeather, and would think best near the scene of his most recent triumph.  
  
 _That means you should really go over to Potter’s house._  
  
But that he would not do, not until he had a reason. It wouldn’t do to let Potter think he was too attached.


	20. Trouncing

  
“Dad!”  
  
The call came from the drawing room. Draco felt his hand begin to rise when Potter looked up from the parchments spread in front of them and wheeled around, and lowered it with an effort. Just because they had been discussing important things when the call interrupted didn’t mean Draco had the right to object. He thought he recognized the voice of Potter’s son, the one his own son preferred. Perhaps it was important.  
  
 _Although I doubt it._  
  
He moved unobtrusively to stand in the door of the kitchen when Potter walked out to answer it, and ignored the way that Granger shifted behind him. She was working well with him today, probably because she had finally decided, based on the way his potion acted for Potter, that he wasn’t evil. She might think he shouldn’t eavesdrop, but so far, she hadn’t objected to Draco wanting to listen.  
  
Potter knelt down before the fireplace. Draco felt his nostrils flare. _He couldn’t have done that a week ago. Do you hear that, Scorpius? Do you hear that, Astoria, wherever you are?_  
  
“Are you all right, Al?” Potter asked, and a faint smile touched his lips. Draco hadn’t seen the way that Potter looked when talking to his children before—he didn’t think the obstinate nephew he had met at Hogwarts counted—but he was sure this was it. “You sound as though someone hurt your feelings.”  
  
A splutter followed, and then “Al” said, “No, I’m _fine,_ Dad. No, wait, I’m not fine. Do you _know_ what your precious Mr. Malfoy said to Scorpius?”  
  
“He told me this morning that he had a conversation with him yesterday,” Potter responded, rocking back on his heels. “But only that Scorpius accused him of lying and not improving the lives of pure-bloods, nothing else. Why, what else did he say?”  
  
Silence. Draco imagined the staring contest taking place. He’d had many of the same sort with Scorpius.  
  
“That’s _it_ ,” Al said. “That’s enough. And you don’t care, do you?” He spoke with the bitterness of someone watching a ruined potion steam out on the floor. Draco wouldn’t have thought any son of Potter’s would have known that emotion, but since Al was going to partner with Scorpius in a business venture involving pranks, he probably did.  
  
“Not so much about that,” Potter said, voice slow and heavy and thoughtful in the wake of his son’s. “Because what Scorpius said might be understandable, but it isn’t true. His father isn’t lying in the way he’s working with me. And you and Scorpius have been making pure-bloods uncomfortable since you got together. His father wasn’t happy when Scorpius went into Gryffindor House, was he? I find it hard to believe that he cares about making people like his father _used_ to be unhappy now.”  
  
Draco’s fingers tapped a little beat on the doorframe into the kitchen. He pulled them back before they could cause much noise, he thought, but Potter must have caught the sound, because he turned his head and smiled at Draco.  
  
Draco blinked and cleared his throat. Potter’s eyes were unexpectedly stunning, when Draco was seeing them from this angle. He ducked his head, and Potter let whatever he might have said die without speaking, turning back to his son instead.  
  
“I know that it’s different when Scorpius sees something that might change his whole conception of his father. I had difficulty letting go of lots of conception. About your namesakes—I told you that before—and about myself after I got injured. But it doesn’t do any _good_ to keep believing something that you know isn’t true, Al. Scorpius’s dad is responsible for making this better.” He slapped his bad knee. Draco winced in spite of himself, but Potter didn’t seem to be in any pain as a result. “I don’t really think someone who’s prejudiced and only involving himself in this struggle to dupe me, or whatever other dark crime Scorpius is accusing him of, would go out of his way to brew such a complicated potion.”  
  
Silence. Then Draco heard a sound like a throat being cleared, and Al said, “You’re going to walk and be okay, Dad? Really?”  
  
“I don’t know how long the potion will last,” Potter said, his voice gentler than—than lots of things, Draco thought, already knowing that he didn’t really want to make the comparison. “But Draco also broke the spell on my knee that was making the Healers who worked on it forget about the damage. Even when they put the memories in Pensieves, someone who looked at it would forget what it really looked like. That means that I have the hope for a real recovery.”  
  
Silence again. Draco wished he could lean out far enough to see the expression on the boy’s face, but he would have hated it if someone had interrupted him like this with Scorpius, so he stayed still.  
  
Then he found that he had compressed his lips. _As if I would ever have a conversation like that with Scorpius. I am not injured._  
  
“I’m—glad,” Al said quickly, as if it hurt to say that much. “But I still have to think about what he’s doing to Scorpius, and I _hate_ that. I hate seeing the way that Scorpius suffers.”  
  
“I can’t promise that he’ll have a good relationship with Draco,” Potter said, voice a shade cooler. “But I think he would have a better one if he stopped accusing his father of lying all the time and focused on something else instead. You told me that you’d almost rented a shop. Concentrate on that. Is it finished?”  
  
“I—ah—”   
  
Draco felt his eyebrows go up, and saw the same expression show on Potter’s face. It didn’t really matter if you were pure-blood or not, Draco thought—one of the few times when it didn’t. That you were a parent meant you understood _that_ hesitation.  
  
“What happened?” Potter asked.  
  
“Nothing!” Al said hastily. “It’s not something we need to talk about right now, I mean. I only firecalled you to talk about Mr. Malfoy, and to ask about your knee, and they’re both really good, right?”  
  
Then he shut down the Floo without giving Potter a chance to open his mouth again. Which meant he was bloody quick, Draco thought, since he had had a chance to observe how fast Potter talked several times now.  
  
Potter sat back, blinking, and then glanced at Draco and smiled faintly. “I hope that your relationship with your son improves outside of this,” he said, standing up with a care that reminded Draco of how much he must expect the potion to stop working any minute now. “But in the meantime, we can at least hope he has other things to concentrate on than spreading the stories about your lying.”  
  
Draco nodded, but had to ask, “You think your son can convince him?”  
  
Potter grinned. “I don’t know. I have someone else who might be able to.” He went on before Draco could ask who that might be. “But—as much as it pains me to say this, Draco, we don’t really need Scorpius to love and respect you. We just need him to stop telling people that you must be lying despite all the lack of evidence for it. I think that fewer people will pay attention to him since you shut him down so well at the Hogwarts meeting, but even the chance that some people might isn’t a chance that I want to take.”  
  
Draco nodded his understanding. “I am not sure why he chose that particular tactic.”  
  
“Because it offended him, I think,” Potter said, and swatted once more at his knee before ambling back towards the kitchen table. “That you could be, as he saw it, prejudiced against Muggleborns and threatening to disown him for not being pure-blood enough one day, and then championing the cause of Muggleborns the next.”  
  
Draco curled his lip, but was aware of Granger behind his back, and kept silent.  
  
Well, Granger and the way that he had touched Potter without flinching the last few times he had examined his knee. But that was something that neither his son nor Granger nor even Potter really needed to know about.  
  
“I understand now,” Draco said, and switched the subject back before Potter could get out of it or Draco could forget about it. “What did you mean, when you said that you had found someone else who might convince him?”  
  
“Teddy came back home,” Potter said, and a subtler glow of happiness joined the one already on his face. Draco stared at him, and Potter rolled his eyes. “Teddy Lupin, my godson. _Your_ cousin. And Scorpius’s. He’d been in Brazil studying Lethifolds. I told him about the problem with Al and Scorpius, and he promised me that he would go talk to them. Someone who’s nearer their own age might convince them more than someone who’s not.”  
  
“I wish you had not interfered,” Draco said through stiff lips.  
  
Potter gave him a faint, rueful smile. “Sorry. I mean that. But although we don’t _need_ your relationship and Scorpius’s to be better in order to make things work out with other pure-bloods, I’d like it if it was better, anyway.”  
  
Draco turned his head away and swallowed hard. He wished he could make sense of half the things pulsing in his chest and pushing at his throat, but he couldn’t, so he settled for saying, “I don’t think the interference will make things better. I think it will make them worse. Will you apologize if it does so?”  
  
“Of course,” Potter said, sounding surprised. He touched Draco’s shoulder, then seemed to realize it wasn’t the right time for that and pulled his hand back. “Or do something else to make it up to you, if you want.”  
  
Draco glanced at him from the corner of his eye. Potter wasn’t smiling now; he waited, his eyebrows up and his head tilted as though he thought Draco would fling an object at him and he had to be ready to dodge.  
  
Draco tried to imagine that state of mind, willing to apologize to someone when you had done what you thought was for the best, and irritably rejected the next emotion that showed up to ram the inside of his heart. They had business to conduct.  
  
“It’s possible that other pure-bloods will follow Highfeather’s example of endowing sanctuaries, but not without encouragement,” he said, aiming his eyes at the high wall of the kitchen and counting the peeling strips of paper there. “That means that I’ll need you willing to appear in public and give it to them…”  
  
And they came up with their plans, nothing more remarkable for the rest of the afternoon than Granger agreeing with him without a reference to the conversation between Potter and his son, and Potter watching him tenderly.  
  
Which might be fairly remarkable, when Draco thought about it.  
  
*  
  
The next morning brought a faint return of pain in his knee, but Harry had expected hat, so he could go down and have his breakfast with a modicum of acceptance. What he _hadn’t_ expected was the sound of fury coming through his Floo. He turned his head, listening, wondering if Al and Scorpius had decided to bring the argument they must be having with Teddy by now into his house.  
  
Then he heard a female voice, and stood up and moved more briskly despite the way that the joint ached.  
  
Lily stood in front of the fireplace, facing Teddy, who looked as though he wished he _was_ a real werewolf at the moment so he could terrify Lily into shutting up. From the way she was speaking, Harry knew this wasn’t the first argument they’d had in the last twenty-four hours.  
  
“If you’d left _well enough alone,_ I would have persuaded them around!” Lily’s red hair looked as if it was about to stand on end, and she stomped closer to Teddy, glaring at him. The glare forced a smile from Harry’s lips. He had so many memories of her mother doing much the same. “But no, you had to come in and throw your weight around as though anyone wanted to see _that,_ and brag about your experience as a man of the world, and make them so resentful that there’s no chance they’ll listen to me now!”  
  
“The stupid things they were saying,” Teddy began, in a voice that Harry knew was meant to imply Lily was _also_ saying stupid things, “meant I had no choice but to explain the truth to them. And I _am_ older and more experienced than they are—”  
  
“Says the man who’s terrified to ask my cousin to marry him because he’s so certain that she’ll hate him for his dad,” Lily snapped.  
  
Teddy’s eyes changed color, towards amber, and his hair darkened. Harry knew he never looked more like Remus than in those moments, but Lily had known registered werewolves from the time she was a girl, thanks to the people who visited her Aunt Hermione, and she only rolled her eyes.  
  
“I think Victoire is more likely to hate you for being a Metamorphmagus than to hate you because you’re a werewolf,” Lily said. She looked Teddy up and down. “Unless you can change the size and shape of _everything_ —”  
  
“That’s enough,” Harry said hastily, stepping in. Lily had sometimes made enemies for life when she talked like that, and Teddy’s face was steadily freezing up, his fists clenching as if he would strike out. “Teddy, what are you doing here? And you,” he added belatedly to Lily. “You still have a few weeks of school.” Of course, it had become somewhat of a fashion among the younger Gryffindors to sneak out of Hogwarts via the Floo to visit their families. Harry thought people had probably done it when he was a student, too, and he hadn’t known just because neither he nor his best friends had wanted to go home all the time.  
  
“He ruined everything,” Lily said, putting her chin up. “I was talking to Al and Scorpius, and I’d made them think about what they were saying, and made them _realize_ that they don’t really want Aunt Hermione to hate them. Or you, either, Dad,” she added, with a glance at Harry that made him smile in spite of himself. “Then Teddy cornered them and said some stupid things.”  
  
“You don’t know _what_ I said—”  
  
“Stupid things,” Lily repeated sternly. “Because when they came back from talking with him, they were embarrassed, but Al just kept saying that Scorpius didn’t have to pay attention to his father if he didn’t want to, and Scorpius kept saying that he did, because his father might ruin the wizarding world otherwise, unless someone stopped him.”  
  
Harry checked a sigh. “It didn’t go as well as you hoped?” he asked Teddy.  
  
“Were teenage boys always that stupid?” Teddy asked earnestly.  
  
“Yes,” said Lily.  
  
Teddy had evidently decided that it was beneath a twenty-six-year-old to argue with a sixteen-year-old, because he turned his head to the side so that even werewolf vision couldn’t have kept track of Lily, and continued with a brittle dignity. “I mean it, Uncle Harry. _Merlin._ Scorpius just kept saying that his dad was really evil, if he’d convinced me to do his bidding, and Al was saying that they wanted to concentrate on their joke shop and not do anything else.”  
  
“I talked to Al myself yesterday,” Harry said, shaking his head. “I hope it can convince him to at least keep out of politics if he won’t be sensible. But Scorpius…the bitterness there is so deep I don’t know what will convince him.”  
  
“Let me talk to him,” Lily insisted. “I was talking to him like Aunt Hermione talks to people she doesn’t really like but has to deal with.”  
  
“And you have the audacity to blame _me_?” Teddy muttered.  
  
Lily said, “There’s a strong smell of wet dog in here, Daddy,” but she shut her mouth and squirmed a little when Harry gave her a look. “Sorry,” she muttered. “ _Anyway._ I wanted him to see that I didn’t really care what he felt about his father. Sometimes Mr. Malfoy is annoying, from the way he talks about him. But he wasn’t really making things better for house-elves and goblins by opposing him. He can keep an eye on things and make sure that you and Aunt Hermione are really in charge, if he wants. But if he wants to sell pranks to all kinds of magical creatures as well as humans eventually, which he _says_ he does, then it’s to his advantage if they get treated better and trust humans more.”  
  
“Where did you get _that_ tactic?” Teddy asked, staring at Lily.   
  
Lily tossed her hair at him. “I told you. Aunt Hermione. She’s always making people see that it’s to their own advantage to treat magical creatures better. I only had to think about what kind of advantage it would have for Scorpius. And it’s even better because he doesn’t have to do things himself, like work beside his dad. He only has to keep from doing some stupid things, like implying that my dad and my aunt are stupid.”  
  
Harry smiled at his daughter. “If you can get him to listen, then I’d appreciate it,” he said. “But ultimately, I think Scorpius will have to make up his mind about whether to live with his dad or stop saying stupid things himself.”  
  
Lily shrugged. “Maybe. I can at least let him know that someone else thinks he’s _being_ stupid, though. He hates the sensation of having an audience.”  
  
Harry hummed in response, and managed to change the subject to one that he knew both Teddy and Lily found fascinating—the secret passages that they had occasionally found in Grimmauld Place, and the way that they seemed to open into each other, as though whoever had built them had assumed that people would want to go from one place to another in the labyrinth rather than in the open air. Teddy and Lily disappeared into the library soon to look at the bookshelves, where they had found a tome once with a scribble in the margin that showed them how to open the first of the passages, and Harry turned and limped up the stairs to his bedroom.  
  
Draco wanted him to appear that afternoon at a gathering of pure-bloods called the Esoteric Song Society. Harry didn’t really know what they did, other than gather around to appreciate music. Draco had said that the house was Highfeather’s, or one of hers, and that Harry was going to dress appropriately or Draco was going to kill him.  
  
Harry chuckled as he began to search among the ranks of robes he hadn’t worn in two years, but which should still fit. Pain had kept him from taking exercise, but also from eating much. He would need Kreacher to press them and clean them, though.  
  
 _What will Draco think if he sees you in these robes?_  
  
Harry folded up those thoughts for storage along with the robes he rejected. Draco hadn’t _promised_ that he would be at the meeting of the Esoteric Song Society.  
  
But Harry could feel the flame of that hope burning in him, strong and bright, and he didn’t try to keep the smile off his face as he dressed.


	21. The Esoteric Song Society

  
“So glad you could come.”  
  
Highfeather spoke the words with a poisonous smile behind them, but Draco knew the source of that venom and didn’t intend to take it personally. He sniffed the glass of wine that she handed him instead, nodded approvingly, and began to sip at it. “Have you seen Mr. Potter yet?” he asked, casting his glance over the room.  
  
Highfeather’s house was old, but marvelously well-kept, which was probably the reason she had reacted so personally to the suggestion that she give up her house-elves. The room’s carpet, a deep red color with golden roses around the borders, successfully gave the impression that the visitor was standing in the middle of a field at sunset. Draco nodded to it, and lifted his gaze to the old but comfortable furniture on which the guests sat, the small eddies of people coming together around the food tables and splitting up again, and the swirling gowns and formal robes in a variety of splendid muted colors.  
  
“Not yet,” Highfeather said, and pressed a hand bright with rings against her chest. “You don’t think that he might have chosen to ignore the invitation?”  
  
Draco’s reply faded in the sound of a door clicking open. A pause in the conversation either succeeded or occurred at the same time, and Draco turned around, ready to toast Potter for making such a grand entrance, whether he had done it on purpose or not.  
  
Potter came in dressed in shining formal green robes, bowing over Highfeather’s hand and murmuring something that Draco couldn’t hear over the sound of his heartbeat. He hadn’t even seen Potter _move,_ struck so dumb and motionless by the sight of those robes.  
  
 _So Potter can dress up when he wants to,_ Draco thought, and tried to summon irritation that he hadn’t done so before now, such as when they held the meetings at Hogwarts. _He was being stubborn before, pretending that he didn’t have the right clothes._  
  
But Draco had to remind himself that, for at least some of those meetings, he and Granger and Potter had deliberately arranged things that way, so Potter would look rumpled and non-threatening to the people who might think he was trying to take over the wizarding world indirectly. Draco had told Potter to change tactics this time, to wear robes that would appeal to high society.  
  
He hadn’t thought Potter would succeed, he decided now, as Potter turned and smiled at him. He had assumed he would have to spend at least some time covering for Potter’s mistakes and attracting attention away from him.  
  
Now he would have liked to attract attention away, but for a different reason. Potter was making the circuit of the room, his hand extended as he bade good afternoon to a number of people that Draco had had no idea he knew. Of course, Potter could have learned that information from Draco’s carefully-prepared notes, but Draco had had no idea that he would _study_ them, either.  
  
Draco swallowed. Perhaps he should reconsider how far Potter would go in pursuit of a goal to better the lives of others.  
  
Potter leaned back against a chair as he laughed at one of Lise Yeldon’s jokes, and crossed his legs one over the other. Draco thought he was the only person, because he was the only person watching that closely, who noticed that Potter grimaced when the back of his good leg touched his bad knee.  
  
 _The potion’s wearing off. And the idiot came anyway._  
  
Draco would have liked to order Potter out of the room, but only a Healer would have that kind of authority, and it would destroy the whole point of having Potter come to this gathering of pure-bloods in the first place. So he caught Potter’s eye, but grimaced at him, and Potter blinked and had the temerity to look puzzled.  
  
Draco turned his back and stalked to another corner of the room with stiff dignity. He would avoid Potter for a time, and hope that cooled his temper.  
  
The temper that had no right to spark, when he thought about it, as Potter had obeyed his instructions. But which was there anyway, and which Draco would best shield by moving away from the origin of it.  
  
*  
  
 _Did Draco have another confrontation with his son? Or did he have a different reason for not wanting to see me here? Maybe he meant to handle it himself and he sent a last-minute owl after I had already left?_  
  
Harry drove the panic into his breathing and managed to soothe it out with a few more breaths. Then he accepted a glass of some sparkling drink from Highfeather and shrugged a little in response to her probing gaze.  
  
“What sort of music can we expect today?” he asked, letting his tongue just brush the lip of the glass. Highfeather’s shoulders came down a little from their high rounded curve.  
  
“A new trio of singers,” she said, and made a small gesture towards three witches who stood in earnest conversation in a corner of the room. Harry blinked. They wore formal enough robes that he wouldn’t have taken them for musicians; they had no costumes at all. “The musical world has not yet recognized their talent for what it is, alas. They are so new that it is like trying to compare one’s first sight of a bird-of-paradise with sparrows.”  
  
Harry nodded, and decided not to mention that he’d never seen a bird-of-paradise. “I look forward to hearing them,” he said, and turned his head as though he wanted to speak to someone else, though really he was looking for Draco.  
  
Draco had his own glass in hand, and stood by himself in a shaft of sunlight that lit his face and hair more brightly than Harry was comfortable with. Harry caught his breath and again let his tongue out to lick the rim of his glass. He couldn’t let Draco distract him. He was here to show that he could indulge the pure-bloods and give a small speech afterwards, Draco had told him. Harry would be letting him down if he didn’t do as they’d advertised.  
  
And he would let down the cause of house-elves like Kreacher, of course, and centaurs like Firenze. But he had cared more about letting Draco down.  
  
That could be a disaster. But Harry had already decided that he wouldn’t let it be. He turned and smiled at the first woman to approach him, and began to make smooth small talk, one of the things that Auror training had given him which he hadn’t lost.  
  
*  
  
 _Does Potter even realize that he’s in pain?_  
  
Draco had begun to think he didn’t. Potter walked and stood and sat, as necessary, but he didn’t rub his knee. That didn’t keep Draco from seeing the shivers of discomfort that radiated up his body whenever his foot brushed the floor, and the way that the slightest touch to his knee made his eyes darken.  
  
Draco swallowed more of the champagne than was good for him, and decided that he would have to focus on the performance, and then Potter’s speech, not the injury. The potion was better than the last one, he knew, and unlikely to give way in the middle of the speech, which Potter could make from a seated position if he wished. Draco chose a chair on the far side of the room as the musicians started stirring and then came forwards to bow solemnly to the audience.  
  
Draco caught his breath as the first singer tossed back her long red hair and faced him. He had thought he would find her too like a Weasley to be worth watching, but she did have a voice—one of the few finds of the Esoteric Song Society who actually did—and the voices of the other two singers blended with hers, creating an exotic, cold music like a vine of ice climbing up the pane of a window. Draco listened to the song that traveled back and forth between English, Italian, and another language that he didn’t speak but thought was Hindi, and forgot about Potter for a time.  
  
When the applause broke out, he remembered, and turned his head. Potter was sitting on a padded armchair, leaning forwards and clapping in a languid way that told Draco instantly he hadn’t enjoyed the performance all that much. Draco sniffed. There were some musical tastes that only a _refined_ audience could really appreciate, that much was true.  
  
As he sat there contemplating that, Potter turned his head. Their eyes met.  
  
Draco’s mouth dried out completely, and the calm mood the music had put him in fell away. There was no ice here, there was only fire, surging up in him: the fire of impatience to approach Potter and ask him about his knee, the desire to know what had transpired with his children in the day since they’d last spoken, the longing to crowd Potter into a little corner and yell at him to his heart’s content—  
  
 _My heart’s content should not matter that much to me._  
  
Draco broke the gaze, hands clenched on his knees and nearly crushing his glass. He relaxed his grip when Highfeather stared at him, rose with a murmur, and forced his way across the room, towards the balcony. There would be breezes there to cool his forehead, and his fears, and what Draco was afraid might be his heart.  
  
*  
  
Harry sighed when he saw Draco leaving the room. He was sure that he must have offended him somehow, although he didn’t know how. But he didn’t actually _need_ Draco there to make the speech they had planned on. And what offended Draco might not have the same effect on the rest of the pure-bloods.  
  
Harry fastened a smile as brilliant as rhinestones on his lips, and was ready when Highfeather turned to face him and gracefully inclined her head. “We _are_ all so fascinated about what you have to say to us, Mr. Potter,” she murmured, stretching a hand towards him. “Will you stand up and tell us all about it?”  
  
He’d assumed they would let him sit, but of course not. He was to stand in the same place as the singers, Harry saw, a neat patch of plush carpet that might soothe his feet a little, but would do nothing for his knee.  
  
And when he stood, it was with a noise like gears grinding, which he sincerely hoped that no one else could hear. He held back his own wince and bowed a little to Highfeather. The pain wasn’t bad yet. This was a test, too. Seeing him walk through the door, she would want to find out exactly how healed he really was.  
  
He couldn’t let Draco down.  
  
“I’ll be happy to speak,” Harry said, moving over to the area of clear carpet and smiling at many faces in the crowd as if he hadn’t already shared conversations with them. “But I did want to take my time to congratulate you on taking action, not merely mouthing words.”  
  
Highfeather looked so gratified that Harry started. _It only takes a word from me to accomplish that?_  
  
Well, at one time he would have known that. But two years of isolation had made him dependent on what other people said about the situation in the world outside, and many of his family either never mentioned whether his fame was still great or, like Hugo, only told him about the ones who had been disappointed that he hadn’t stayed on as a great Auror. Harry reckoned he would have to start paying more attention.  
  
 _You have the power. Use it._  
  
“Madam Highfeather,” Harry told the open-eared crowd, “as you may not yet know if you have better things to read than the _Prophet,_ endowed a sanctuary for unicorns. At one stroke, she preserves beauty for future generations to look at, and may also preserve her _own_ future generations. I think we owe her a tribute.” He reached into his robe as the applause began and drew out a little medal that he’d Transfigured from an old kettle which he’d never liked. That had caused Kreacher to stare at him reproachfully, but seeing the way Highfeather’s eyes kindled, Harry knew that he’d made the right decision. “Please join me in giving her a token of regard.”  
  
The applause soared as Harry came forwards and carefully draped the medal, of iron and silver, over Highfeather’s neck on a silky red ribbon. Highfeather reached up to touch the ribbon, then dropped her hand as if she had recalled where she was and thought someone would think less of her for doubting the medal’s reality.  
  
“Thank you,” Harry said, looking into her eyes, and trying for the melting expression that he knew the Ministry had expected him to adopt when being given an award for something. “There’s nothing that means so much to me as seeing magical creatures get a fair chance, and you’ve proven that you know what it takes.”  
  
Highfeather spent some more time staring at him, her fingers playing with the ribbon, and then nodded and looked away and said, “Yes, certainly.” Her shoulders hunched a little. Harry wondered if he had made her do that, or if the situation had. Perhaps she was better equipped to deal with opposition than thanks.  
  
 _Well, so am I._  
  
Harry moved back into the center of the cleared patch of floor. Between one step and another, his knee locked up.  
  
He had had this happen before, though, if never in front of as many important people. He caught himself casually against a wall as though he had stumbled over a tiny ripple in the carpet and smiled at them. “Never been as good on the ground as I was in the air,” he said lightly.  
  
Gentle cascades of laughter, a few more claps. Harry stood up and began talking about how other pure-bloods could do the same thing, endow sanctuaries and fight for the rights of magical creatures and the birth of their own children with money, and how he and Draco and Hermione would be very grateful if they did.  
  
They hung on those last words the most, Harry saw with a smile he fought to suppress. Apparently all of them wanted medals like the one he had given Highfeather. Though it was probably the hands she had received it from rather than the cheap little medal itself that attracted them.  
  
 _Whatever works._  
  
*  
  
Draco leaned his head against the glass door that shut the balcony off from the room—not something he would have done normally, but he knew that no one in his potential audience would notice him right now—and stared silently at Potter as he exploded through his speech.  
  
Explode was the right word. His voice came out in little bursts of information, and then he would pause to think, and start off in a new direction. No one in the audience minded. That was how they preferred to listen to speeches, Draco knew, to hear praise of themselves mixed in with much shorter pieces of what wasn’t praise.  
  
 _He’s doing well._  
  
That depended on what one meant by doing well, of course. Draco’s eyes moved from Potter’s face to Potter’s knee. He had seen the stumble when Potter first began speaking—Potter should never think that he could hide things like that from Draco, and Draco intended to tell him so at the first opportunity—but he had recovered well from that, too. Perhaps they had nothing to worry about.  
  
Then Potter shifted his weight.  
  
The pallor flashed across his face like a comet. Draco stood and silently opened the glass door, gliding into the room. No one noticed him, still rapt on Potter. And even then, what rapt them away was his words and not his face, or Highfeather, at least, would have made a point of mentioning that something was wrong.  
  
That was a clever gesture of Potter’s, with the medal, Draco had to admit. Now Highfeather was much more likely to consider herself an ally and do something to rescue Potter if she saw him failing, because what happened to them concerned her as well.  
  
But no one could rescue someone they thought looked perfectly fine. Draco moved off to the side, drifting, listening to Potter’s fine words and watching for the moment when the knee gave out. He had thought the potion would come to a more gradual decline, but instead it had given Potter more pain-free days than he’d reckoned on and instead was coming to a sharper end.  
  
 _If it can only last a few more minutes. If it can only give us time to get out of here._  
  
But instead, someone in the audience asked a low-voiced question after the thunder of the applause that marked the end of the speech, and Potter leaned forwards to listen, all his weight dropping like a sledgehammer straight down onto his knee.  
  
The stunned surprise that flashed across Potter’s face _had_ to be visible to the most inexperienced. The speaker paused, and then Highfeather stood up and came forwards, words as soothing as ice on her lips.  
  
She didn’t make it in time to catch him, and neither did Draco, trying to make his way there with both speed and subtlety. Potter gave a little, agonized moan and measured his full length on the carpet.


	22. Like Compassion

  
Harry woke up to concerned faces leaning over him, and Draco leaning over his leg, and he flushed as red as the ribbon on Highfeather’s medal. He braced his hands on the floor and started to sit up.  
  
“Oh, Mr. Potter, you mustn’t move.” That was a woman Harry hadn’t spoken to, a tall pure-blood woman with more nostril in her face than anything else. She took her wand from her pocket as she spoke, and cast a few spells that made sparks rain down over his knee. Draco turned his head to half-look at her, but she didn’t see the deadly edge of his expression the way Harry did. “I’ve taken training as a Healer,” the woman continued. “You must remain as still as possible until we can get you to St. Mungo’s.”  
  
“No, he needs movement,” someone behind the woman disagreed. “And fresh air. A walk back and forth on the balcony would cure him faster than _anything_.”  
  
“Wine,” someone else said, a man whose face came into view as he craned his neck. “And a pain potion of some kind, poor bloke. Did you see how pale his face turned right before he fell?”  
  
Harry blinked. It seemed that perhaps he hadn’t ruined everything after all by fainting in the middle of an important pure-blood gathering. Maybe it helped to have the audience on your side before you fell.  
  
“Back off.”  
  
That was Draco, but Harry only knew it because he’d heard that voice in many different moods now, from the public register Draco adopted to the sneering at the Healers he indulged in when they were in private. More than one person fell silent and turned to look, and then tumbled back from Harry in a graceful hurry when they found that Draco had his wand aimed at them. Even Highfeather moved further away, though she kept her hand on her medal as if it was a pledge of safe conduct. Harry noted the way her eyes moved from him to Draco, who still had his hand hovering above Harry’s knee, and knew that Draco would hate the way those eyes narrowed and she seemed to sniff.  
  
“ _Well_ ,” said the woman with the nostrils, snapping her wand back into her pocket and her head to the side as she moved backwards, probably, Harry thought, so no one would see the way her hand shook. “As if one could want to stay near someone who’s so rude to her.” She turned her back and looked around for a glass of wine, but no one handed her one. Harry checked his chuckle and turned to Draco.  
  
He met a glare that would have done justice to the basilisk, and Draco saying in the same grinding tone, “You spent too long on your feet. Now you’ll have to spend longer in a bed. Do you understand?”  
  
Harry did, but he wondered if Draco did. To be betraying such confidences in front of their possible allies might make Harry look weak, or Draco. Harry had no idea if pure-bloods considered it weak to care for someone outside of your family, but it seemed likely.  
  
“Thank you for your concern,” he said, and tried to produce the carefully unimpressed smile that he thought would be the best fit for the situation—well, a situation where they were trying to convince the pure-bloods that they weren’t worried about what had happened, anyway. “If you could help me to get up, then I’m sure our kind hostess will offer me a seat and I can finish my speech from there.”  
  
Draco hunched like a gargoyle now. Harry blinked. He wasn’t sure of much, with his head spinning dizzily between a hundred different possibilities for what could happen next and trying to keep track of the alliances that he thought were changing and drifting around him, and with the pain in his knee flaring up like a windstorm, but he knew one thing: he had just pissed Draco off even more.  
  
 _I didn’t mean to._ But there was little to do now but keep still and keep his gaze on Draco’s face, waiting uneasily for some sort of signal.  
  
*  
  
 _The idiot._  
  
Potter seemed to think that he needed to preserve a little distance between them even now, but it was too late for that. Draco knew it had probably been too late for that the moment he came back through the balcony door, and _certainly_ by the time that he made a dash for Potter. Given that, he was not about to tolerate Potter’s attempts to treat him as a mere acquaintance at best.  
  
“You’re going to lie down,” Draco said. “And you know as well as I do that you’ve strained the joint too far, and that you’ll be in pain tonight if you don’t lie down immediately.”  
  
Potter’s eyes widened to the point that Draco thought he might actually be able to see a jade-green slice of idiot hero brain. He kept staring into them, and let the other people around them think what they would. It was more important that Potter not permanently disable himself than that they keep or lose a few temporary allies. After the speech Potter had made, and the medal he’d awarded, Draco thought it likely that they wouldn’t drift as far away, anyway.  
  
And all the time and effort and imagination he had poured into the potions and into breaking the memory charms on Potter’s knee would _not_ be wasted.  
  
Potter might be an idiot hero, but he had enough sense left to know when he shouldn’t challenge someone. Draco presumed it was how he had got along with Granger so well all these years. “All right,” he said meekly, and held out his hand so that Draco could help him up.  
  
Draco ignored the hand and tapped his wand against the leg just above the knee. Potter drifted to his feet instead, in a variation of _Mobilicorpus_ that gave the person it was cast on a little more control; he could move by waving his arms and kicking off with his other leg. Potter’s face was still sunset-brilliant as he stood up, but that wasn’t Draco’s problem. He herded Potter towards a chair, threatening to kick in his good knee when he hesitated.  
  
Eyes were on them, wondering eyes and solicitous ones. Highfeather had already made several offers that Draco had declined or accepted on automatic courtesy; he was grateful, for once, that his parents had made some effort to drill it into him.  
  
But for Draco, at that moment, no eyes were more important than Potter’s.  
  
Perhaps that should have terrified him. It didn’t. Instead, he simply settled Potter into his chair and pulled out the pain potion he had brought with him on instinct. “Here you are,” he said, and held the flask to Potter’s lips.  
  
*  
  
 _What are you doing?_  
  
Harry stared up at Draco and shook his head, then grimaced as his teeth bumped against the lip of the glass flask. Perhaps not the brightest idea that he’d ever had, then. “Are you mad?” he tried to mutter under his breath, not easy when he knew that everyone in the room was listening to them. “Do you think— _don’t_ you think this has gone far enough?”  
  
Draco’s hand holding the flask didn’t move, but his other one did, pressing forwards and down, and Harry realized that he had it on the nape of Harry’s neck, urging him to swallow the potion.  
  
Harry hesitated once, then decided that, really, things couldn’t get much worse, could they? If Draco had decided it was safe to do this in public, then it must be. Draco was the one who knew pure-blood life from the inside out.  
  
He swallowed, and the potion burned away some of the pain and the sensation that his brain was jumping around inside his skull, seeking a way out through his ears. His throat burned, but that was a good trade-off. And a moment later, the ache in his leg eased enough that Harry knew he could stand up.  
  
He sat up, against the pressure of Draco’s hands, and smiled at him. “Thank you,” he said, then turned his head until he saw Highfeather, and bowed to her. “I’m sorry to have ruined your meeting,” he said.  
  
“Nonsense,” Highfeather said, in the bracing tones that Harry thought she usually reserved only for intimate friends. “You gave us a very interesting speech, one that I think will linger in the memories of everyone here.” She glanced around at the other members of the Esoteric Song Society, and there were nods, sniffs, a scattering of applause.   
  
Harry blinked. _She’s telling them that that should linger in their memories more than my collapse. Wow, she really is on our side now._  
  
“An interesting speech,” Draco said, his voice clipped the way it got when he was struggling against some high emotion. Harry wondered if he knew that he was doing it. “A thrilling one. But now, I think, Mr. Potter needs to make sure that he gets home and into bed as soon as possible.”  
  
A few of the stares coming at them turned speculative, but if Draco wasn’t going to care about them, then Harry wouldn’t, either. He nodded and started to stand up, but stopped when Draco’s hands all but tightened around his throat. Harry leaned back against the chair and blinked at Draco, wondering when he had decided to care instead of be insulted.  
  
“And without being on his feet as he does it,” Draco added, eyes fastened to Harry’s now as if he had no intention of letting go.  
  
Harry just shook his head. “I’m all right to walk a few hundred meters to the Apparition point,” he said. He didn’t think Highfeather’s house was that far from it, but better to be generous with the distance than give Draco a reason to be angrier with him.  
  
“Is that what you think?” Draco shifted his weight so that he was pressing down on Harry’s knee with his hand.  
  
Harry felt his face go cold. Draco gave him a small, mean smile, and moved back with a nod. “Then come along.”  
  
His spell, a _Mobilicorpus,_ got Harry out of the chair and floating along. Harry felt the blood that had left his face come back with a vengeance when people stood back in an aisle to let them pass. It wasn’t that he had wanted to avoid attention, exactly; he had come in formal dress robes and prepared for a speech for a reason. But making a fuss because of his injury was something he had spent years in Grimmauld Place to avoid.  
  
Draco seemed to have lost all awareness of the political situation, or at least any semblance of caring about it. He exchanged a few words with Highfeather, who nodded and once again played with the ribbon around her neck, smiling at Harry.  
  
“Thank you for coming to a meeting of the Esoteric Song Society,” she said, holding her hand out to Harry. “I _do_ hope that you will come back and enjoy my hospitality again.”  
  
Harry bowed over her hand and tried to murmur something that he hoped sounded convincing. He was tired, and he was floating, with the sense of disorientation and wanting to grab a solid piece of furniture and hang onto it that always accompanied that, and really, he would have been perfectly happy to go home and sleep for hours.  
  
Except that he hadn’t wanted to drag Draco along with him, particularly when Draco was already fed up with him.  
  
He waited until they were out the door, and then until they were far enough from the door that Harry _thought_ no one could eavesdrop on them. He kept his voice light. “Thank you. If you don’t want to come with me, you don’t have to. Kreacher will take charge of me the minute I Apparate back, you know.”  
  
“What makes you think that you can Apparate anywhere?”  
  
Harry blinked, mildly insulted, and finally turned to look at Draco. “There’s this license they gave me that says I can.”  
  
Draco shut him up with a look that Harry thought he should have used on Scorpius long before now, one that made Harry’s throat tighten and his urge to cough take over. He shook his head back and forth and recovered in a minute, but by then, Draco had herded him to the Apparition point and had a hand on his back that seemed to challenge Harry to do what he could to break free—if he really wanted to.  
  
“They’re still watching,” Draco murmured. “You recovered from the mistake of not taking care of yourself, but you don’t want them to think that we have a disunited front for any reason.”  
  
No, Harry didn’t. He held his tongue and scowled. Draco curled an arm around his waist and one around his shoulders, drawing him close.  
  
And suddenly Harry could feel the silken cloth of Draco’s robes against his cheek, he could close his eyes and breathe him in, and he had the perfect excuse to hold on tightly to Draco as they moved through the dark, squeezing space of Apparition.   
  
_Why was I objecting again?_  
  
It only took that time of an Apparition for Harry to make peace with his feelings. He still didn’t know when the hour would come to confess them to Draco, but at least they were there, and he knew it, and he could stop worrying about what it would mean for their alliance. Now, he knew.  
  
*  
  
Draco grunted at the house-elf who immediately bobbed out to receive them. Kreacher would take care of Potter, as he had said, but Draco stepped into the house anyway and floated Potter up the stairs, then deposited him in his bed and stood guard while Kreacher fetched a tray of food, more pain potions, a glass of water, and a softer robe.  
  
Once, Potter started to lift his wand. Draco looked at him, arms folded. Potter immediately fell back against his pillow and looked at Draco with shining eyes.  
  
Draco kept the steady expression on his face with an effort. He would have thought that Potter would dislike anyone who crossed his will, even now. Yes, he had matured in many ways since their Hogwarts days, but he had cared enough to go up against the collective desires of the pure-bloods of the wizarding world. That bespoke someone who was still used to getting his own way.  
  
And, well, he was _Harry Potter._ Not many people could have refused him in the last few decades.  
  
“If you think I need to rest, then I will,” Potter said, and closed his eyes. His forehead acquired some new wrinkles as he shifted the leg.  
  
“When did you start realizing that you should have sat down to deliver that speech?” Draco asked grimly, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. He had already come up with and rejected several ways to begin this conversation. He couldn’t accuse Potter of doing this to spite him, or to set back the cause they were fighting for. Potter actually did care about house-elves and the future of pure-bloods in the most sickening Gryffindor way.  
  
“Before I stood up,” Potter admitted, his head turned so he could look past Draco while he ate some of the translucent slices of ham that Kreacher had brought up. “But Highfeather said that I should stand, and I thought I shouldn’t refuse in case it was a test.”  
  
“A test,” Draco said, and shut his eyes as he sighed. “Potter, not all pure-bloods are that paranoid or searching, you know.”  
  
“I don’t know,” Potter said simply. “You’re the only member of that society I’ve ever known who _acts_ like a member of that society. Neville and Scorpius and Ron and the rest of them are different. And you searched hard for a way to disprove my theories.”  
  
Draco looked at him again. He could have said many things, but all of them were too sharp in his mouth, and none of them would solve the problem it seemed they had here.  
  
“You need to stay off your feet for at least the next five days,” he said.  
  
Potter raised an eyebrow. “And you know that because you’re a Healer?”  
  
“Because that’s how long it will take me to brew another dose of the potion that will last longer,” Draco said, standing. “I’ll try to make sure that I have all the ingredients I need here, but I’ll almost surely need to venture out to buy more, and Granger may need our help for our movement during that time, too. You’re only to give her the help that you can give from a bed, mind.”  
  
“You’re staying?”  
  
Draco turned. Potter hadn’t said that in the tone that Draco would have if someone had assumed they could stay at the Manor without being invited. Draco needed to see the expression on Potter’s face to judge his tone.  
  
Potter’s eyes were soft, his limbs melting into the bed, the lines of pain on his face tumbling down like spring rain. Draco tried to imagine the last time someone had been that thrilled by his mere presence and…  
  
Could not remember. Could not imagine.  
  
Perhaps his mother, when he was first born.  
  
“Thank you,” Potter whispered, before Draco could say anything. “I wanted you to, but I didn’t know how to ask. _Thank_ you.”  
  
And he closed his eyes and dropped straight into gentle, natural, relieved sleep, without even the pain potion Kreacher had brought.  
  
Draco stood still for a long time before he could make himself leave the room, and even then, he had to pause outside Potter’s room and rest his forehead against the wall beside the door, his eyes closed, his body working with shudders, before he could come up with the list of Potions ingredients he would need to transport from the Manor.


	23. Homework

  
Draco bent over the flask of the potion and added the last of the crumbled sunflower seeds to it. An innocuous ingredient most of the time, but he had found it worked best when it came to the potions that he was creating for Potter. Perhaps it was because the sunflowers were like Potter, tall and springing and so _radiant_ that it was hard to ignore them when you saw them in the garden—  
  
Draco’s hand flexed on the mortar and pestle that he’d used to crush the seeds, and he reminded himself that those were a dangerous kind of thought. He had to keep his mind focused on the potion in front of him, or he ultimately wouldn’t create anything usable.  
  
When his mind seemed limpid again, he stirred the potion with a single stab of the rod and then stepped back. The potion bubbled and burbled and settled into a calm dark red state, with a swirl of purple near the bottom. Draco watched the swirl narrowly, and it didn’t move. He nodded. He didn’t think he had yet achieved a brew that would last longer than the potion he’d given Potter before, but he thought he was close.  
  
“ _What_ are you doing here?”  
  
Draco tensed to keep himself from jumping. Then he turned and looked his son in the eye.  
  
“Brewing,” he said. “And someone with any modicum of courtesy ought to know not to interrupt a brewer who’s in the middle of a potion.”  
  
Scorpius sneered at him and took a step further into the room. His head was quick and angled like a stork’s, snapping around, as though that would let him learn something that just looking in through the lab door hadn’t.  
  
Draco watched him silently. Scorpius wore his Gryffindor house tie and a shade of red in his hair so vibrantly crimson that Draco imagined it probably distracted some of his professors.  
  
But Draco had spent enough time talking about that, and he knew Scorpius wouldn’t listen to him now. Perhaps he should never have objected in the first place. Then Scorpius might have been content to let things die, instead of becoming more and more determined to annoy his father.   
  
_I wish I had done many things differently._  
  
Scorpius examined every flask, every vial, every cauldron that Draco had set out in the potions lab at Potter’s house—although Potter didn’t brew himself, he had space for people who did—and then turned around and shook his head at Draco again. “What do you think you’re going to accomplish in here?” he asked. “I mean, really?”  
  
“In this case, easing the pain in Potter’s knee for longer than I did last time,” Draco said, surprised and impressed with himself that his voice was steady. “Last time, I managed five days. This time, I want a week.”  
  
Scorpius took a sudden sideways step, coming near him. He was breathing fast. Draco adjusted his own breathing to slow, deliberately deep inhales and exhales in consequence, as if he was trying to avoid hyperventilating.  
  
 _And perhaps I am._  
  
“No,” Scorpius whispered. “That can’t be what you want. Not _really_.”  
  
“Why not?” Draco asked. “I know that I told you I would disinherit you and get another child. But it might be years before I can do that. And I’ve accepted that now. I’ve also accepted that I don’t really want the bother of marrying someone else or arranging for a contractual marriage simply to breed, and then raising another child.” _I didn’t do it so well the first time,_ burned on his tongue, but he managed to change it to, “I don’t know that the second one wouldn’t hate me, too.”  
  
Scorpius stared at him through the red hair, and looked like a Weasley. Well, he had Weasley blood, Draco reminded himself. The pure-blood families were so intertwined that it was no surprise Scorpius might look like one of them, or perhaps even Granger’s children, although the only one Draco had met was Potter’s sullen nephew.  
  
“You’ve changed your mind,” Scorpius said, as though repeating the words might alter their substance in some way.  
  
Draco nodded.   
  
Scorpius took a deep breath. “Then what are you _here_ for?” he said, hard enough that the flask leaped on the table and Draco leaped with it. “What can you possibly want? You’re not going to get someone else to torment out of this! Go home.”  
  
Draco shook his head. “I want to help Potter,” he said. “He’s a good political ally to have, and the puzzle of his knee and how to heal it is interesting to me.” If it was more than that, well, his son was the last person he would confess it to, when he was still trying to figure it out for himself. And Scorpius would only do something twisted with the knowledge if Draco gave it to him, anyway. Draco would have to sound convincing to _himself_ before he hoped to convince anyone else.  
  
 _Even then, shouldn’t you tell Potter first?_  
  
“I hate you,” Scorpius whispered suddenly, his eyes brimming and his fists drumming on his legs, making Draco stare at him. “Why couldn’t you—you care so much about _him_ and about your bloody family legacy, why couldn’t you care that much about—”  
  
He turned and ran, but Draco could read what he would have said as easily as if it were written on the air in letters of fire.  
  
 _Why couldn’t you care that much about_ me?  
  
And that left Draco standing there feeling as though he had just survived an earthquake, and only long dedication to the quality of his potions, and his dreams of a week without pain for Potter, made him turn slowly back to the flask.  
  
*  
  
“How did you deal with me without smashing my head in?” Teddy asked as he came into Harry’s bedroom. “For that matter, how did you deal with Jamie and Al up to this point? Teenage boys are _ridiculous_.”  
  
Harry laughed at him. He had a stomach full of the hot food that Kreacher thought was necessary to cook for an “invalid,” and he had firecalled Jamie that morning about his work with dragons in Romania, and he had Draco in the house. He could bear even more tales of Al’s stupidity.  
  
“You learn,” he said, and waved his wand to pull a chair out for Teddy. “You’ll see it yourself, if you have sons someday.”  
  
Teddy froze in the act of sitting down. Then he coughed loudly and turned his head away. “Of course I will,” he said. “I might. I mean, if I find the right girl to marry, and she doesn’t care about—that werewolf thing.”  
  
“You might have one who wouldn’t care already,” Harry pointed, because he felt cheerful enough to tackle even this. “But you can’t know if you don’t tell her and give her a fair chance to react.”  
  
“I care too much about Victoire to screw things with her up like that,” Teddy said, and then leaped over the obstacle that was Harry’s opening mouth and charged on. “Anyway, I talked to Al and Scorpius again. I think Al’s well out of it. He’s said that he’s going to support his friend _and_ his family, and concentrate on the shop that he’s opening. He said that he was glad you were doing good things for house-elves.”  
  
Harry nodded. That sounded like the sensible son he had raised. Or sometimes thought he had raised; Ginny and Hermione and Ron and Molly and even Scorpius had helped, too.  
  
“But Scorpius…” Teddy ran his hands through his hair, which promptly changed to bright red curls that he could tug on more easily. “I think he’s just more self-centered than I’d reckoned on. He won’t _listen._ He’s convinced that everything his father does is focused on him, and that means he can freely ignore the good you expect to do for house-elves. Because what his father wants is to inconvenience and embarrass Scorpius.”  
  
“Would it do any good for me to talk to him?” Harry offered quietly. “Because I really do think that Draco came into this intending to have another child, but he knows too much about the problems with that idea now to think that it’s a matter of just sitting down and brewing one.”  
  
Teddy shook his head. “I did say that, but Scorpius said that you’d been duped, and I’d been duped, and everyone but him and Al had been duped. That Mr. Malfoy is some kind of evil mastermind whom everyone trusts.”  
  
“Not _everyone_ ,” Harry muttered, thinking of the way Hermione still watched Draco sometimes. “But enough.” He took a deep breath. “There’s someone else I’d like you to talk to. Or at least take an owl to. I would firecall him, but I think he would refuse to do anything but yell at me.”  
  
Teddy beamed. “Sure! Who?”  
  
“Hugo.” Harry held Teddy’s astonished gaze. “I think it’s time we had this out.”  
  
*  
  
Draco sat down at the kitchen table, and blinked when Potter nodded at him and went on writing the letter in front of him as if he had better things to do than talk to Draco. Draco reached for the butter and the honey; Kreacher had made scones, tempting enough to make Draco glad he had decided to stay. If Potter wanted silence at the breakfast table, well, Draco knew how to take a hint.  
  
Potter glanced up once and smiled at him, but otherwise continued writing until he pushed the letter away with a loud sigh. Draco noticed, then, that the plate in front of Potter that Kreacher had put there was still full, and that the level of pumpkin juice in his glass hadn’t changed a bit. Draco started to open his mouth.   
  
Kreacher popped up in front of Potter and stared him down. Potter looked at him with steady eyes for a minute, then lowered them.  
  
Kreacher vanished, point made. Potter started eating, his fingers quick on the butter and honey knives as if he thought that taking huge amounts at once would make up for what he had failed to eat so far.  
  
Draco reminded himself to remember in the future that house-elves were cleverer and prone to notice more than one thought they did, and returned to his own breakfast. When Potter had got down one scone and made a start on the next one, Draco cleared his throat politely. “Whom were you writing to?”  
  
Potter flushed. “I know it should be Highfeather, or one of the Muggleborn families that’s still deciding what to do about this information,” he muttered. “Some of them don’t like it at all, you know. Because they don’t have problems with their fertility, they see it as a pure-blood problem, and they’re determined to ignore it.”  
  
“Until their children want to marry someone who’s pure-blood,” Draco said, rolling his eyes. He knew from experience that some people desired grandchildren more than they had ever wanted children.  
  
Potter grinned at him. “Exactly. And Hermione is working her arse off to show them that, but they don’t always listen, even to her. I know I should write them more letters than I do.” He swallowed juice and dried it with the bit of scone that followed.  
  
Draco shuddered, but horrible manners couldn’t distract him from Potter’s words. “ _Should_ does not mean the same thing as the indicative,” he murmured. “You should have been writing letters to them—perhaps—or making a more productive use of your time, but you were not. Whom were you writing to?”  
  
Potter ducked his head, peering at Draco from under his fringe. “I _should_ have known that I couldn’t put you off like that,” he mumbled.  
  
Draco delicately dipped his scone in the melted butter that had accumulated on his plate and then lifted it to his mouth, taking a bite of the soft, dripping bread, showing Potter how it was done without letting him off the hook.  
  
“I’m writing to Hugo,” Potter said, and his lips firmed. “I think this has gone on long enough, the way he despises me. And since I’m walking now, I stand a better chance of healing the quarrel than I did before. And he could interfere in the real business of getting rights for magical creatures and children for pure-bloods. I would prefer that he not take it into his head to do anything serious.”  
  
Draco snorted and laid his scone back on the plate. “He makes my son look like a marvel of compliance. What makes you think that you can get him to agree this time?”  
  
“Teddy’s agreed to deliver the owl,” Potter said, and leaned back on his chair, swinging his legs. A moment later, he paled, winced, and drew the bad one back up on the stool that stood permanently under the table now. Draco raised his eyebrows. He would have liked Potter to take breakfast in bed, actually, but Potter had rebelled against that after yesterday, as if he assumed it was decadent. “I think that was part of the problem before. I tried to talk to him, in person or through the Floo. He could always yell and interrupt me in person, and I felt too guilty to talk for long. But in an owl, I’ll have the ability to talk and he can’t interrupt. And I think that he’ll be intrigued enough to contact me, at least. If he isn’t, well, I haven’t actually lost anything.”  
  
Draco resisted the temptation to praise Potter’s new head for strategy, holding the example of the recently re-injured knee in mind, and said, “Why did you feel guilty? You hardly arranged to have yourself kidnapped and tortured, unless you have the most devious criminal mind the wizarding world has ever seen, in which case I salute you.”  
  
Potter had one of those weird expressions on his face that said he couldn’t decide whether to snort or laugh. He shook his head as a compromise, then murmured, “I wanted to be his hero. I never wanted to let anyone down again, but especially not any of the children. I didn’t know Hugo idolized me that way. And you’re right, I couldn’t have avoided being injured, but I should have noticed that he idolized me that way _before_ all of this happened, and sat down to talk with him about it.”  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. “You aren’t responsible for that, either.”  
  
“I idolized Dumbledore,” Potter replied quietly. “And Sirius. I’ve lived through that kind of disappointment that comes with realizing you’ve placed expectations on an adult and they’ve fallen through every one of them. I should have recognized the disease when I saw it growing in Hugo.”  
  
“No, you shouldn’t,” Draco said, and interrupted when Potter opened his mouth to continue, because he was growing bored of this argument. “I received an owl from Highfeather this morning, inquiring after your health. Shall we invite her to visit?”  
  
Potter blinked and looked around the kitchen. “My house can’t compare with hers. Do you think that’s a good idea?”  
  
Draco smiled. “You’ve gifted her with a medal. From now on, she’ll be your ally, unless you do something that offends her mortally, and she’ll also be a bit pleased that you aren’t up to her standards—yet. That will give her the ability to improve you, and her sort does so _love_ to improve things.”  
  
“I don’t think you ever wanted to.”  
  
Draco stiffened. Then he smoothed his fingers out flat on the table and managed to answer honestly. “No. I wanted your attention because it might improve my standing, but I never wanted to—change things. Not in the same way. What did it matter to me how you lived, what kind of manners you had, whether you ate off wood or china?”  
  
Potter leaned back in his chair and watched him thoughtfully. “And now, Draco? Is it all desire to not hold the cause back, that you’re brewing this potion and helping me? I’m grateful,” he added, and quietness of his voice quelled Draco’s fears that Potter was adding that simply to escape Draco’s disapproval. “But I’d like to know.”  
  
Draco curled his fingers into his palms. This was harder than facing Scorpius, than facing the fact that he might have cared so little about Scorpius that he was justified in running away from Draco and turning his back on his father. But he didn’t know why, and as moments passed, his breath and his blood heated until he thought he was going to faint.  
  
“Draco?” Potter’s voice was soft, friendly. He reached out, and his light touch fell on the back of Draco’s hand, his fingers stroking as though he thought Draco would fly apart without the reassurance of that touch.  
  
Draco broke.   
  
He bolted to his feet and out of the room, and knew even as he ran that it was cowardly. Not the kind of cowardice that Potter and _his_ kind had once accused all Slytherins of having, which was really just the lack of the pretend courage that the Gryffindors indulged in all the time. But the kind that went deep, searing, and had been the thing he most feared Astoria would see in him and turn away from.  
  
As she had. As his son had, seen one way.  
  
Now, his fear was that Potter would turn.  
  
But he shut the door of his lab and busied himself with the potion nevertheless. Because his heart was pounding and his face was flushed, and if he met Potter right now, his body and not his words would tell the truth for him, and that was not something Draco wanted to happen.   
  
And because he knew that Potter, unlike Astoria, would wait for him to be able to tell the truth on his own.


	24. Brought on Owls' Wings

  
Harry made sure not to stare at Draco the next time he saw him. Draco wanted to pretend that nothing had changed, wanted to talk about his potion without making eye contact with Harry and tighten his hands down into small fists whenever Harry made a move towards him. Fine. Harry leaned back in his bed and talked about the politics of Highfeather’s visit, and watched the way that the light flared back in Draco’s eyes, the way that his hands rose and fell and his voice became strong again.  
  
Harry _wished_ there was a way he could tell Draco he wouldn’t demand any return of his feelings immediately, or ever, if Draco didn’t want to. But he thought talking about it at all would only encourage more of Draco’s nervousness, so he looked slightly past his shoulder and said, “Do you think I should offer Highfeather anything to eat while she’s here?”  
  
Draco leaned back and gave that due consideration, his hands linking around his knee. Harry watched him and found something to admire even in the way that the tendons stood out on the backs of his hands, in the way his veins glowed through his skin.  
  
 _I have it bad._  
  
Harry didn’t care, though. No one else was going to be harmed by what he felt for Draco, so he didn’t need to hold back or restrict it.  
  
“No,” Draco said at last, judiciously. “Because you do your cooking by house-elf, and she might think that you’re being hypocritical when she notices that. If she asks, have Kreacher leave tea outside the door and bring it in yourself. She’ll still know how it got there, of course, but that’s something that’s relatively easy for her to ignore.”  
  
“Fetch it myself?” Harry looked at his knee.  
  
“By then, you’ll be able to walk,” Draco said, and turned his head in the direction of the lab. “That, I can promise.”  
  
Harry nodded. “And what kind of silver should I use, and what kind of china?”  
  
Draco gave him more advice, and even his clenched jaw relaxed as he spoke. Harry hoped that he didn’t notice the warm flush Harry could feel working its way up beneath his skin, but if he did, at least he didn’t seem disposed to get upset about it. That was all Harry would ask for, really. To be near the object of his obsession, to look at him, listen to him, work with him. When it became more than that, _if_ it did, then Draco would have chosen it himself, and would have no reason to fear.  
  
*  
  
“We have too many letters to answer.”  
  
Draco raised his eyebrows as he watched Granger tip her huge armful of owls onto Potter’s kitchen table. It did look that way. But when he began to sift through the letters, he sniffed. There were too many names that he recognized, names that belonged to half-bloods and thus exiled them from the ranks of the Muggleborns that Granger wanted to respond to, and wanted Potter to write personal notes to.  
  
“Put these on the bottom of the pile,” he advised Granger, interrupting her as she was raking her fingers through her hair and about to begin another tirade. “They’re pretending to more outrage than they feel.”  
  
Granger spun to face him like a martial artist. “You would decide that,” she said, and her voice snapped and almost broke, like the strand of hair she was stretching around a finger. “I always knew your true colors would emerge, when you felt that you had Harry trusting you enough.”  
  
“Will you be quiet,” Potter said, in a casual tone, before Draco could. “He only means that those letters are from people who have some pure-blood heritage and usually identify themselves that way. They’re trying to have it from both sides, saying that they’re pure-bloods and can’t be forced to stop using house-elves, and then bitching because we haven’t paid enough attention to Muggleborns.” He waved his hand at the letters Draco was holding and went on assembling a small pile in front of him, of what Draco assumed were important names. Except for Granger’s lectures, he was honestly unfamiliar with most of the “important” Muggleborns.  
  
Silence, and Granger turned red.  
  
Draco held her eyes and said nothing. Then she reached down, picking up the letters that Draco hadn’t sorted yet, and went back to reading the envelopes.  
  
Draco nodded to Potter. Potter nodded back, a little distant. He had been that way in the last two days, Draco thought. Potter seemed to have decided that he only owed Draco common courtesy until he finished the potion.  
  
Or perhaps he had seen what Draco intended to hide and was giving him some space to decide what he wanted to do about those feelings.  
  
Draco’s fingers scrabbled at the edge of the kitchen table for a moment, and then he shook his head and leaned back. No. He would not think that way. If he thought Potter had a straight line into his heart and soul, he would cower before the man, instead of retaining enough distance to be a good political ally and critic.  
  
“I know that you wrote to Hugo the other day,” Granger said abruptly, seeming to have decided that she should bring up a different uncomfortable subject if her discussion of the first one had been blocked.  
  
Potter leaned back in his chair and looked at her, calm as a sage. “Yes. I think it’s ridiculous that I’ve let this go on so long, the way that he whines at me and pretends that I deserve no consideration because I’m not his hero anymore. He could start efforts against the house-elves, or he could distract me as we get further into them. So I owled him, because even if he rips up the letter that way, he can’t interrupt me.”  
  
“I don’t think,” Granger said, nipping at her lip. “I don’t think it will accomplish anything.”  
  
“Certainly, standing around and waiting for the brat to come to his senses won’t,” Draco drawled. He wanted to leave the subject behind and get on with sorting the letters, perhaps even write some of the ones that had been too-long delayed, but it was plain that neither Potter nor Granger would do that until Draco intervened and made them. “It’s a wonder to me, Granger, that you haven’t already made your son apologize to Potter. You’re all for the rights of house-elves and werewolves, but wounded humans aren’t one of your prize groups? Or are you only for the rights of everyone as long as it doesn’t require your children having to explain themselves?”  
  
Granger turned and stared at him. “I don’t think _you_ , of all people, have the right to complain about how someone else raises their children,” she began, body rod-stiff.  
  
“He does,” Potter said, voice as calm and icy as Draco’s had been. “Because Hugo is distracting me. And I wrote a letter to him when I could have spent my time more productively writing or talking to someone else, because he nags me. He’s actually declared that he’s on the opposite side from you, his mother, as well as us.”  
  
Granger only bowed her head and shook it. “You know the difficult things with your children,” she whispered. “Hugo is like Al was, when he was twelve. It’s—it’s just difficult to wait for them to do anything but grow out of it.”  
  
“Al was ashamed of being a Slytherin for three months,” Potter said, leaning across the table and rapping one finger down on the back of Granger’s hand. “And that was because several of his Housemates told him he could help them with a harmless prank that turned out to almost _kill_ someone else. Hugo’s been ashamed of me for more than two years. I didn’t do anything but get tortured.”  
  
Draco kept his eyes lowered, because he wanted to hide the triumph blazing in them from Granger. Potter was using Draco’s words and concepts now, and using them _well,_ better than Draco had thought he possibly could.   
  
More than that, though, he wanted to keep what he felt hidden from Potter. Because Potter was more likely to see, and then he would _know_.  
  
“You agreed to this,” Granger whispered. “You know that all of us agreed he would come around eventually. And we understand him, we were all so disappointed when Dumbledore turned out not to be what we thought he was—”  
  
“I never manipulated Hugo into saving the world,” Potter said, his voice sinking. “I never told him that he would have to die to do it. I never left him alone on dangerous adventures in Hogwarts. We _over_ protected our children, if anything, because we didn’t want them left to face the challenges that we faced when we were their age. Hugo doesn’t have anything to forgive me for. I know how we thought, Hermione, but lately I’ve been thinking more about it, and deciding it doesn’t make much sense. I want Hugo back as my favorite nephew. I want him to know me as more than the indulgent uncle, and if he can’t accept that, I want to know that, too, so I can stop waiting for him to come back.”  
  
Granger looked up then. “You would give up on him forever because Malfoy said so?” she asked, gesturing with her head at Draco as if using a finger would demean her.  
  
“No,” Potter said, and his face had gone calm and angry both at once, which was an expression that Draco had never seen before but thought he could stand to see again. “I’m doing this because I realized that I was making myself miserable for _no reason._ Hugo might hate me forever, I don’t know. But waiting for him doesn’t work. And I want to do this, I want to make sure that I know the answer, one way or the other. I’ll be happy to welcome him back and talk to him again if he actually wants to talk. If he wants to blame me, then I can stop waiting, and he can be the one to make the first move sometime if he decides that he’s ready to grow past his stupid teenage disappointment.”  
  
Granger didn’t look up, didn’t move, now. She was sorting through the letters, and it seemed to take all her strength for her to exhale, hard, and say, “I—I don’t like the pain that it’ll put Hugo through, but I think—you’re probably right. In fact, someone should probably have done it a while ago, but we didn’t want to listen to his whining, and we thought he was too much like us when he wasn’t.”  
  
Potter smiled at her. Draco blinked. He would have placed his bet on Granger’s dogged opposition until the moment that both Potter and her son died, because once she took up a cause, she didn’t let go.   
  
_Apparently she can, if someone she’s friendly enough with asks her._  
  
Draco grunted and turned back to his own cache of letters. That was the reason he had never seen it, then. He had hardly seen someone demand that Granger stop what she was doing in a _friendly_ context, after all, instead of one full of opposition.   
  
And that gave him something more to think about as their conversation turned, and became more about who they should write to next and who they should invite over than anything else.  
  
*  
  
“Uncle Harry.”  
  
That was Hugo’s voice, small and sullen as ever, but there, not in the fire, where he could shut down the Floo connection and interrupt their conversation any time he liked. Harry shivered a little and laid his paper aside, looking up as Hugo stepped through the doorway into his study and then halted, uncertain, swaying on his feet, his hands making fists at his sides.   
  
“Hugo,” Harry said gently. This was closer than they had been in two years, except during the confrontation at Hogwarts, and then he had been up on the stage and Hugo had been beneath him. It seemed to imply a much greater distance than Harry knew had actually been the case. He waited now for Hugo to make the first move, keeping his hands calmly folded precisely _because_ of how much he longed to touch Hugo. It would have to wait.  
  
“Why did you write this letter to me?” Hugo held up the letter in a shaking fist and made it rustle. “You know what I think about you and your stupid movement to make house-elves miserable and give pure-bloods a chance—”  
  
“It’s not about that,” Harry said. “It never was. It was meant to show pure-bloods that being unkind to magical creatures is going to backfire on them. Why do you think that it was just a way to soothe the pure-bloods’ consciences?”  
  
Hugo licked his lips. “Because you’re working with a bigot,” he said, as if he didn’t know himself. “Mum curses his name every time she comes home.”  
  
“Your mum knows her own mind,” Harry reminded him. “She would have stopped working with him if she found it too stressful.”  
  
“But she _shouldn’t have_ to do that,” Hugo said, and now strong sparks were leaping to light in his eyes, and Harry thought they might get away from the distractions and into the actual argument that Hugo wanted to have with him and had cut off every time. “She should be able to do what she wants to fight for house-elves without worrying that she’ll need to work with Draco bloody Malfoy!”  
  
Harry shook his head. “She’s fought for the rights of house-elves without him for thirty years. What makes you think that she’ll stop that, or that this cause is going to replace that one?”  
  
Hugo stopped. He stood there, silent and staring. Harry looked back. Some of his nieces and nephews had had cases of thinking that _they_ were the ones who knew better and had to protect their parents from decisions the parents had willingly made; Harry thought all teenagers did, although it was a little strange to him because he hadn’t had parents at that age. But Hugo had it worse than anyone Harry had known.  
  
And it wasn’t focused on Hermione, much as he wanted to pretend that it was.  
  
“Hugo,” Harry said, when some time had passed and it was all too obvious that Hugo wouldn’t make the connection on his own. “You _know_ that talking about your mum is another way of avoiding talking about me.”  
  
“Why are _you_ doing it, then?” Hugo promptly demanded. “Dad told me all about how Mr. Malfoy tormented you in school and tried to make you fail and tried to scare you at Quidditch. Why don’t you think he’s evil?”  
  
“Because it’s been a long time since then, and he’s doing good work for us,” Harry said, and tapped his knee, which was currently stretched in front of him on a stool. “It’s thanks to him at the moment that I can walk at all. What would you prefer? That I be stretched out on a bed and moaning with pain?”  
  
Hugo shook his head. “Of course not! I never wanted to see you in pain. I never _wanted_ you to be in pain in the first place!” By now, he was shouting.  
  
“Really?” Harry smiled at him, and nicely calculated the blow that he gave then. After all, he had brought Hugo here so that he couldn’t retreat any longer, and his efforts would be wasted if Hugo simply managed to scuttle off into a different discussion or out of the room. “But that’s not true, because you wanted to hurt me when you shouted at me that I should never have let the warlocks capture me.”  
  
Hugo turned pale. Then he said, “I never said that.”  
  
“I’m quoting from several conversations,” Harry said. “With less cursing and blaming of myself, it’s true, but I think you can forgive me for leaving those out.”  
  
Hugo shut his eyes and shook his head. “You don’t—you don’t understand,” he said. “I never wanted you to suffer like that. I never wanted you to _suffer_ at all.”  
  
“You’ve done a bloody good job of disguising that.”  
  
And that, finally, knocked Hugo over the edge. He opened his eyes and advanced on Harry, his face furiously bright, his hands reaching out as if he intended to drag Harry out of his chair. Harry, who knew that he could summon Kreacher with a single whistle, just sat there and let him come.  
  
Besides, he trusted Hugo—or rather, this was the final test of his trust, his final attempt to get Hugo back. If Hugo hurt him physically, that would be a sign of a bridge crossed forever.  
  
“I didn’t want you to get _hurt_ ,” Hugo hissed, right into Harry’s face, so that a little fleck of spittle landed on his cheek. Harry didn’t bother wiping it off. “You don’t _understand._ I never wanted you to stay down. I wanted you to _get back up._ ”  
  
“What do you think I’ve been doing the last few years?” Harry asked him, whisper-soft. “Learning to live again, learning to cope with the injury—”  
  
“You couldn’t even _walk!”_ Hugo yelled, and Harry heard a stir down below. He hoped that no one was stupid enough to come into the room. Draco and Kreacher were the only ones in the house right now, besides them, and Harry had told them both not to interfere. “You wouldn’t take that treatment the Healers offered you! You kept saying that you needed to get used to the pain, but you _fight_ the pain, you don’t get used to it—”  
  
“It’s never going to go away, Hugo,” Harry said quietly, and threw the words at him. “Even with Draco’s potion, it’ll never go away again. That was why I had to get used to it. And when I fought it, when I used my knee too much, it just hurt worse. There are some things that you can’t fight. There are some things I’m not a hero about. I know it hurt you, to realize that I couldn’t always be the hero and come back, but I didn’t do that to _hurt you._ And I should have told you this a long time ago, but I think you’re a selfish little brat for acting as though my primary motivation was to put you in pain.”  
  
Hugo shook his head, as though shedding the words. “I’m not selfish.”  
  
“You wanted me as a hero,” Harry said, “or you wanted me dead. That was another thing you said, that I should have died if I was going to lay back and give up. When I was fighting against the pain harder than I’d ever fought anything in my life, when I was looking for reasons to go on with my life instead of moping all the time, you told me it was no good because I wasn’t perfect anymore.”  
  
“I never said—”  
  
“Uncle Harry,” Harry said, and raised his voice, “why are you even _sticking around_ if you can’t walk anymore?”  
  
Hugo backed up a step as though the words had been a slap. “I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean you should _die_.”  
  
“That’s what it sounded like,” Harry said, and at last the anger was there, the strong, good, clear anger that he had learned how to access when he was thinking of the warlocks and what they had done to him, instead of the muddled anger that made him feel as though nothing good was left to him. “And you’d better start thinking more about the implications of your words. You implied that you wanted me dead, that if I wasn’t a hero I was nothing, that I’d disappointed you and that was the worst thing I could have done. And worst? You made me _believe_ it sometimes.”  
  
“Uncle Harry—”  
  
“There were days that I did tell myself it would be better if I was dead, because my knee hurt _so much,_ and at least there wouldn’t be pain if I was dead and didn’t have a knee. There were times when I decided I was worthless if I couldn’t be an Auror and I might as well stay in bed for the rest of my life. It wasn’t you who got me out of that. It was Kreacher, and your mum and dad, and your sister, and your cousins and aunts and uncles, and now Draco. You’re the only one who didn’t help _somehow_.”  
  
And then Hugo did run out of the room, but Harry rather felt the point had been made. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against his chair, letting his panting fall into silence.  
  
Purged, at last.


	25. Entertaining Highfeather

  
“This is a very—old house, Mr. Potter.”  
  
Harry hid a grin as he leaned back and waved Highfeather in through the front door. He could imagine all the things that her words hid, all the emotions, but they were being polite and pure-blood and not showing them.  
  
“It is,” he said, as Highfeather sat down in his drawing room and stared in several different directions at the wallpaper, at the old portrait of a man Harry had found upstairs and hung here—Harry thought he was a Black ancestor, but he never spoke, and there was no name on the back of the portrait—and at the cheery fire on the hearth. “I know that my godfather, Sirius Black, never liked it, but it’s been a source of comfort to me.”  
  
“Because it afforded you privacy after your—accident?” Highfeather crossed her legs under the formal robe and focused on him.  
  
 _We also aren’t calling things by their real names,_ Harry thought, but he nodded to her. “Exactly. No one could reach me here, behind the wards, unless I wanted them to. And it was acknowledged that reporters wouldn’t harass me for an interview.” He paused and pretended to think about that, although in reality much of what he would say was scripted and he and Draco had practiced it the evening before. “Well. Acknowledged by me and my family, at least. The reporters took a few stings from the wards before they learned.”  
  
Highfeather laughed, her voice deep and warm. Harry watched her and wondered how many different shades of emotion she could command, how many ways she had of saying the same thing. She looked very different from the sulky woman who had challenged them at that first public meeting.  
  
There was a soft chime from the direction of the door. Harry glanced at it. “That’ll be the tea,” he said.  
  
And stood up.  
  
He knew that Highfeather had leaned subtly forwards, not because he saw it—she was too delicate for that—but because she would want to see how well he had recovered after the disaster at her house. Harry didn’t look back at her. He simply walked over to the door, his knee a distant pain, and bent down to pick up the tray of steaming tea and biscuits that Kreacher had left there. He heard a soft grinding noise, but nothing more than that. Draco was a miracle-worker.  
  
He turned around, only to find that Highfeather had bowed her head to him. “You could have spent the rest of your life hiding here,” she murmured. “These are _very_ powerful wards. But you chose to venture out and help others, instead. I admire you, Mr. Potter.”  
  
Harry blinked, thrown. He had known that Highfeather would be anxious to puff up his consequence now that they were allies, but he actually hadn’t expected this private show of support. He came slowly back to the couch, less because of the knee than because he was afraid of spilling something and because he wanted to know what her game was.  
  
But Highfeather only held out her hand and accepted her cup of tea as though nothing had happened, then selected a delicate biscuit with marzipan flowers from the tray and took a bite. Her eyes rolled back for a moment before she shut them. “Delicious,” she whispered. “Might I inquire who makes them for you, Mr. Potter?”  
  
It was time to toss the script out the window, Harry knew. They hadn’t anticipated this question, either. “My house-elf,” he said, and sat down on his couch and picked up a chocolate biscuit. The marzipan ones tended to make him sick with too much sugar. “Kreacher. I inherited him from my godfather.”  
  
Highfeather peered at him through one eye. “And you can trust him to stay out of the room if you ask him to?”  
  
“Yes,” Harry said, meeting her eyes. “Because I _ask_ him to.”  
  
Highfeather sat there on the point of the needle for a moment as though she was contemplating leaping off, but then she nodded back to him and finished her biscuit, starting in on her tea. “And you have three children,” she murmured.  
  
“I do,” Harry said. “All born within a few years of each other.” He knew that many pure-blood families had multiple children only through dint of trying and many miscarriages. “And all perfectly healthy.”  
  
Highfeather smiled, leaning forwards. “I know many who would give much for such abundance. Who would give everything, perhaps.”  
  
Harry leaned back and let a little smile play around his lips, one that he hoped would unite him with Highfeather against the world. “Well,” he said softly, “then shall we see what they’re willing to pay?”  
  
That was a sentence he didn’t need any of Draco’s coaching for, and from the way that Highfeather smiled at him, all her teeth and all her joy, she recognized the difference in the way he was now handling her, too. “My _pleasure_ to help you plan such a coup, Mr. Potter,” she said softly.  
  
Harry let his smile widen, and they got down to business.  
  
*  
  
Draco clucked his tongue sharply against the roof of his mouth. He could see through the enchanted eyes of the portrait that Potter had hung on the wall; the spell to send its inhabitant to another frame and cast a shadow of him in the home picture instead, one that would be a motionless puppet for the wizard to look through, was technically Dark, but Potter had given him permission to practice it. They were behind some of the most powerful wards Draco had ever seen on a pure-blood house, anyway, as Highfeather had noted.  
  
He understood why Potter had decided to throw the script out the window and rely on his instincts alone for dealing with Highfeather. She had been more emotionally open than Draco had thought she would be during the conversation, taken more risks, offered a higher gamble.  
  
But Draco still wished there was some way he could be in the room without Highfeather assuming he was controlling Potter. She would want to challenge him for that position more than she would mind a pure-blood in charge of the Savior, but Draco wanted to encourage neither interpretation.  
  
 _Neither does Potter._  
  
Draco shifted, and forced himself to listen. Potter and Highfeather were talking about ways that they might make it more possible for pure-bloods to donate to magical creature sanctuaries under assumed names. Some of them would never want their names on display to the public as supporters of these mad ideas, although they would want the benefits, and most of their circles would know they had donated anyway.  
  
Draco paused. For the first time, probably because he’d spent so many hours around Potter and his breathtaking honesty, the system seemed silly to him. Why go through so many convolutions when everyone would know the truth, and you spent time and energy covering it up that you could have spent doing something else?  
  
He laid the thought aside. Whether or not _he_ liked it, it was the way that pure-bloods for the most part operated, and they had to invest in the techniques that would make magical creatures, and thus the magic that guided them and influenced the lives of wizards, happy.  
  
Highfeather and Potter came to an agreement about allowing wizards to donate under Highfeather’s aegis—which would also give her a better reputation, making Muggleborns think that she was giving up more of her personal fortune than she actually was—and Highfeather rose to her feet, holding out her hand. Potter clasped it. He didn’t seem to expect Highfeather to pull him to his feet. He stood there in front of her, looking up, fearless as always, but off-balance in a way that had nothing to do with his knee.  
  
For that matter, Draco could feel his heart reeling in a dizzy pattern and his vision exploding with flashes of light. He shook his head and tried to concentrate. Was something wrong with him? Had he not eaten enough that morning?  
  
“I’ve long thought,” Highfeather said in a low voice, “that the high rate of divorce among pure-bloods needs a remedy. And, of course, many of us might begin to have more children, into our last decades, because of the long lifespans that wizards enjoy. What do you think, Mr. Potter? Don’t you agree that the birth of several new children, especially for those who have successfully raised one family, is a necessity?”  
  
Potter stood there looking up at Highfeather, and at least the expression on his face said that her announcement had taken him by as much surprise as it had Draco. If that hadn’t been the case, Draco would have—  
  
He would have done something. Something that no one could mistake, something that would leave Highfeather no doubt that he was eavesdropping on her little proposition.  
  
 _And that means that you would ruin the trap you went to such great lengths to set up, as if the politics of the moment, the greatest political struggle you’ve ever been invested in, should be sacrificed to the emotions of the_ instant.  
  
Draco held his breath and his silence until he was sure the dangerous time had passed, and in those few heartbeats, Potter had already reached up and pried Highfeather’s hand off his arm, although he never lost his smile.  
  
“It’s a thought,” Potter said. “But we should also be encouraging our children to choose their goals wisely, and their behavior. It would be disastrous if our generations treated house-elves gently and our children lost the chance to benefit because they continued to order them around the way they always thought they should be able to.”  
  
Highfeather smiled and stepped away from Potter, bowing. “That is true, and wisely spoken. I think that you are much wiser than you appear, Mr. Potter. I think you know good sense when you hear it.”  
  
There were more courtesies after that, and protestations of being obliged, and insistence by Potter on escorting Highfeather out, but Draco had to admit that he didn’t really hear them. He was concentrating on the deep whoosh of air in his own lungs instead, the way that they filled his chest when they expanded, and the way that all of this made his whirling mind slow to a stop.  
  
He knew what Highfeather had suggested to Potter. And even Potter, inexperienced as he was, couldn’t mistake a marriage proposal that unsubtle for anything else.  
  
But Draco had had no right to react as he did. He and Potter were both divorced, and they were allies, and Potter was wounded and Draco was helping him, and they both had adult or nearly adult children. It was worthless to think that Draco should have the right to be jealous over a marriage proposal of any kind.  
  
 _I am not jealous._  
  
Draco stepped back from the eyes of the portrait and made his way towards the drawing room, schooling his face and his breathing and his voice. When Potter saw him, he should have no reason to think that Draco had nearly exploded.  
  
But when he opened the door and Potter looked keenly at him, the first thing he said was, “What’s wrong?”  
  
Draco found himself pinned to the spot, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and no answer at the ready.  
  
*  
  
Harry, with his head high and his heart pounding furiously, thought he knew what was wrong with Draco. But he didn’t want to make a guess and presume, especially when it could be wishful thinking. Or, at the very least, he could be reading more into Draco’s behavior than was there because he wanted Draco to be jealous over him, fight over him.  
  
Draco shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, in a croak.  
  
“If you could see your face and the way it looks right now, you wouldn’t say that.” Harry remained against his couch, rubbing his leg above the knee in a slow circle. He wouldn’t come nearer; he didn’t want to pressure Draco. But he couldn’t help the yearning that rang through him like a bell, and he pushed with a few more words. “Did you think of something I should have said to Highfeather?”  
  
Draco closed his eyes and touched his eyes, his forehead, the bridge of his nose. “No,” he said coldly. “You know that she didn’t do what we expected her to do, but nevertheless, you performed perfectly.”  
  
Harry sighed. He wished that Draco wasn’t taking this tack, but if he had chosen it, Harry would be cruel to flush him out. “Thank you,” he said. “There isn’t much that needs to be done for the next few days. Hermione is already preparing the next public meeting for the Ministry—”  
  
“Why there?” Draco’s eyes flared open.  
  
Harry smiled. “It shows how central we’ve become, going from the furthest edge of the wizarding world and meeting in front of my secluded home to meeting in the center of wizarding power. And she knows a lot of people we can plant in the audience to ask the right questions, and people who can help make sure the meeting is safe. I’ll answer any questions she has, but I don’t think she’ll have a lot; she’s pretty experienced at this kind of thing. Why don’t you take a few days off and speak to Scorpius?”  
  
Draco’s eyes widened. “Excuse me?”  
  
“I know that he came here the other day, and left abruptly,” Harry said. “Kreacher told me. I don’t know what you talked about, and I won’t ask.” He spoke as quickly as he could, since Draco’s brow was bending and furrowing and he knew that Draco would probably try to interrupt. “I just know that it was something serious. Would it help if you contacted him the way I contacted Hugo and asked him to come and talk to you? But in your house, or somewhere else. Or even here. You could have a room, and I promise that I wouldn’t try to listen in, the way that you let me have privacy to deal with Hugo.”  
  
“Stupidity,” Draco whispered. “When he could have hurt you.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “We’re talking about you and Scorpius right now, not me and Hugo.” Draco’s mouth trembled open, and then he shut it, but Harry imagined that he knew what Draco would have said. He paused, licked his lips, and said, “Unless you _want_ to talk about me and Hugo. Or don’t want to talk about you and Scorpius. You know that I don’t want to force you into talking about something you aren’t comfortable with.”  
  
“Really?” Draco leaned closer, his nose pointed straight at Harry like the end of a muzzle. “Because it sure didn’t seem that way to me.”  
  
Harry kept his face calm and his leg straight, he thought, although he couldn’t help rubbing his leg again. “I am sorry for interfering between you and Scorpius the way I did by sending Teddy to talk to him—”  
  
“Your nephew could have _hurt_ you,” Draco hissed. “You let him walk into the room with you when you had no idea what he would do. You deliberately got him as angry as you could when you knew he could lash out.”  
  
“Could isn’t the same as would,” Harry said. He was getting dizzy from the leaps and turns of the conversation, but he faithfully tried to follow the track that Draco was choosing. “And I got him angry, yeah, but it was the only way to be sure that he wouldn’t interrupt or run away like he has all the times before.”  
  
“You want me to approve of that,” Draco said, stalking closer to him. “You want me to _stay out of the way._ You probably feel the same way about Highfeather and her little offer today. Tell me, if I wasn’t behind the portrait watching, would you have accepted her offer?”  
  
 _Ah_. Harry could feel a shrill, desperate tightening in his ears, but he didn’t even lick his lips, because that might scare Draco away.  
  
“Never,” he said. “I’m not interested in her.”  
  
Draco froze. But either he had come too far to retreat, or he thought retreating would be worse, because he got closer, until he and Harry were breathing into each other’s nostrils and Harry thought he would die of hope.  
  
“Her offer would never work, you know,” Draco whispered, confidential as a lover. “She’s proud of her family, but they don’t have as good a bloodline as the Potters. And they’ve struggled with children for the last ten generations. You would _never_ get along with the way she treats her house-elves.”  
  
“Glad to hear it,” Harry said, and managed a faint smile. “Since I’m not interested, you know.”  
  
Draco seized his hand and dragged him closer. Harry stumbled, and cursed his knee. If Draco paid attention to that _now_ , then it could be weeks before they got back to this point, or never.  
  
But instead, Draco leaned in closer and closer, and Harry held his breath and waited, and then Draco froze and stood there waiting.  
  
Harry had been wanting this moment for so long that he could do nothing but throw back his head and curl his hands around Draco’s neck so as not to fall. The dazzle of fireworks behind his eyes, the hope for a kiss, was that great.  
  
And still the moment hung between them, and hung.


	26. Stunning

  
Draco didn’t know how he had come so far, so fast, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to continue.  
  
But Potter was in front of him, his eyes shut as though he was drowning, his balance wavering back and forth. Draco swallowed, hard enough that he felt his own eyelashes flutter and brush Potter’s. If he stepped back, then Potter would fall to the floor. He was the only one holding him up right now, not his potion and not Potter’s own pride and not Potter’s own legs.  
  
Draco placed his hands slowly on either side of Potter’s mouth. He knew that touching Potter’s skin should repulse him—it was the way he had been raised, it was the way he thought—but those emotions didn’t come. Instead, what he felt was greed, a desire for _more,_ to touch and take and keep going.  
  
It had carried him this far.  
  
He wasn’t sure if it would bear him any further.  
  
But the moment between them had become intolerable. Draco could feel it grating on his nerves like broken glass. He needed to move _somehow,_ say _something._ His hands trembled, and his fingers dug into Potter’s skin, and he wondered if he could get away with shoving him off. But he pictured Potter staggering and missing the couch, and if he hurt his knee, he knew that no one would let him near Potter again.  
  
He wanted…  
  
He didn’t want Potter’s laughter, or his scolding, or even for him to look at Draco with reproachful eyes because of what he had offered and what Potter had thought was free for the taking.   
  
_Then there’s only one way out, and you know what it is._  
  
Draco stooped forwards and kissed Potter with all the patience he could summon, all the desire, and all the fear. He didn’t want Potter to laugh at him, and so he kissed him so well that Potter would have no _choice_ but not to laugh, that he would have no _choice_ but to kiss back. His hands would hold Draco’s, and his tongue would come out to find his, and he would moan if Draco tried to back away and leave him…  
  
And all of that was happening. Draco’s eyes shut and opened, and Potter’s tongue was still there, touching his, his grip still firm and steady and his moans still persistent. Draco shuddered and pressed into him, rubbing his hips back and forth before he thought about it. And Potter clung to him.  
  
Clung, and was supported, and didn’t fall. Draco didn’t hear laughter. He didn’t hear Potter dropping to the floor. He held him, and only staggered back to sit on the couch Highfeather had left when the pressure and the pleasure became overwhelming and he knew he would fall if he tried to keep standing.  
  
 _So good. This isn’t—this isn’t what I thought it would be._ Sometimes Draco had imagined kissing another man, or kissing someone who wasn’t a pure-blood, and he had always expected to feel dirty, like he was sliding into hot mud. But this was just hot.  
  
Potter fell with him, and grunted as his knee hit the side of the couch. Draco immediately pulled back, prepared to apologize if he had to, prepared to do almost anything if Potter would simply say that he wasn’t hurt.  
  
 _And this is what you wanted to avoid. You wanted to not be dependent on him, and you wanted to maintain enough of a distance that—_  
  
Except that there were no words after that. Draco couldn’t remember what he had wanted the distance for, and he still obeyed the rules his mother had taught him to follow, which was that it couldn’t be very important if he didn’t remember it.  
  
“You kiss so well,” Potter whispered against his lips, sounding a little drugged, a little awed.  
  
Draco drew him up again, reaching down to touch Potter’s leg beneath the knee. “You didn’t hurt your knee?” He sounded like a Healer, not a lover, even with Potter sitting in his lap, but Potter opened his eyes and gave Draco a shining smile despite that. Draco’s skin prickled. He was smiling back without reason or necessity, and that was once something he _never_ would have done.  
  
“No,” Potter said. “It’s sweet of you to be concerned, though.”  
  
 _Sweet._ The word set up a ringing dissonance throughout Draco’s skull, because it was the kind of word he would have rejected once for being too weak, and that his father certainly never would have tolerated being applied to him. Narcissa might have called Lucius sweet, maybe, when they were teenagers, but Draco found it hard to imagine.  
  
 _But you aren’t your father._  
  
The world seemed to shift and thump when he thought that. And Draco was Draco, sitting on a couch with Potter in his arms, a _half-blood_ in his arms, a half-blood he’d just kissed. He shook his head, dazed. He wondered if he could get used to being Draco as well as Malfoy, a lover as well as a Healer and an ally.  
  
From the way that Potter was looking at him, a brilliancy to his eyes and face that Draco had never seen even when Potter could walk and fly unhindered, he at least knew there was someone who would help him.  
  
*  
  
“Do you really think you should be doing that?”  
  
Harry glanced up with a smile. He had been smiling constantly since Draco kissed him. Since Draco had made it clear that at least part of this was his _choice_ , and that meant Harry wasn’t as wrong in pursuing him as he would have felt otherwise.   
  
“It’s just moving a few dishes around,” he replied, and picked up the dinner that Kreacher had left on the kitchen counter. They hadn’t known how long Highfeather might want to stay, this first time, so Harry had asked Kreacher to prepare extra food and leave it behind under a Warming Charm. “Less distance than I carried the tray from the door to the couches in the drawing room today.”  
  
Draco took it from him. He walked over to the table and put it down without a word. Harry raised his hands and walked after him, sinking into his chair and stretching his leg out on the stool under the table when Draco glanced sternly at him.  
  
It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d had to carry a dozen trays, Harry thought. He could have done it as easily as a dozen Snitches. Probably easier, since the trays wouldn’t be trying to get away from him.  
  
He was full of air, and light, and heat.  
  
Whenever Draco looked at him, even though the content of most of his looks was disapproving, Harry wanted to shut his eyes and sing. He had a smile on his face, and cushioning coldness and softness—or so it felt—around his knee, and a desire to see people so he could do something good for them. If Hugo had walked in through the door at that moment, Harry would make him welcome and not even ask him if he had reconsidered his attitude towards Harry from the past few days.  
  
 _Does Draco want to tell everyone else?_  
  
Harry had to admit that he didn’t know that, not yet. But he would ask Draco before the evening was out, and the first rush of joy would fade a little, too. Then he could behave appropriately when Hermione came over to help them, or his children and nieces and nephews visited, or anything else happened.  
  
 _Some of them might think that there’s nothing appropriate about this._  
  
 _I don’t care,_ Harry replied as if to a conversation, watching Draco as he took the seat across from Harry. All that thinking, and he was still barely a few steps across the room. Harry’s mind raced faster, too, jumping between different subjects, giving him different things to dance with, making him breathless with play and possibility.  
  
 _He makes me happy._  
  
Draco leaned forwards and rapped his fingers in the middle of the table, as though he thought he needed to catch Harry’s attention, as though he believed it would have wandered. Perhaps because he realized in the next instant that Harry was gazing at him devotedly, he cleared his throat and said, “We need to discuss how this will work.”  
  
Harry nodded. “I understand. Would you rather not mention this to anyone yet? Or can I tell some people and not others? Or no one? I’ll do whatever you want to.” He could have run out into the garden and grabbed a broom and flown if Draco wanted him to. Perhaps, though, from the suspicious glances Draco kept darting at his knee, it might be better not to mention that yet.  
  
Draco leaned further back in his chair. Harry watched him, quietly. Once, that movement would have cut him, would have looked like a retreat, but now he had the necessary faith that Draco would come back.  
  
“I don’t know yet,” Draco said, his voice low and charged. “It would make things more difficult with Granger if she thought that we were snogging on the side and working to spread your theory at the same time.”  
  
Harry clucked his tongue. He didn’t know what Hermione would do, to be honest. She would have blasted people working for her in a political campaign for doing that, because there was the chance that their enemies would use it as criticism, but he was her friend, and she was more tolerant of Draco.  
  
“We can keep quiet about it for now, then,” he offered. “It does seem like it would cause problems right now, and Hermione might not be able to keep it from influencing how she treats you. But I want to tell my friends as soon as you grant me permission.”  
  
Draco frowned all the more fiercely. It was too late, though. Harry would never see his face as ugly or forbidding again, so if he was trying to achieve that, Harry thought happily, he might as well give up right now. “Why? You act as though they’ll be proud of you for snogging someone like me.”  
  
“I don’t know exactly what they’ll do,” Harry admitted. “I never did anything like this before.”  
  
“What’s _this_?” Draco lifted his nose until Harry could see up it, but Harry knew what that meant now, and it didn’t bother him.  
  
“Dated a bloke,” Harry said. “Dated someone we weren’t friendly with in school. It was just Ginny, and then it was divorce, and I haven’t gone out with someone since then.”  
  
Draco stared at him. “What? Why not?”  
  
“Have _you_ gone out with anyone since you divorced Astoria?” Harry asked. “It’s like that. I didn’t want to. The divorce from Ginny wasn’t—unfriendly, but it made me feel bad anyway, because I wanted it to work out, and for our children always to have one house to come home to. They’ve been wonderful about it, and so has Ginny, but I felt that way. And then this happened.” He tapped his leg above his knee. “That didn’t leave me much time for dating or thinking about dating, either.”  
  
He stopped, because Draco was pressed into a corner of the chair, which meant he must have said something wrong without knowing it. “What is it?” he asked quietly, and leaned back himself, so Draco wouldn’t feel crowded.  
  
*  
  
 _How can he just—talk like that? About everything that’s happened to him, about everything that matters to him?_  
  
Draco didn’t know. But he thought Potter might expect the same of him, and that made his skin crawl. He wasn’t like that. Free, open, uninhibited, chattering. The secrets he had revealed to Astoria, he had done so because he believed that she should know the kind of man she had married, and that it wouldn’t be as glorious as some Malfoy marriages had been in the past, because Draco was not his father.   
  
Potter would never ask the same kind of thing of him. But his giving was a kind of taking at the same time, an offer that called for recompense.  
  
Potter studied him, and Draco sat there and struggled with his silence, because even an admission of _this_ that seared him would come close to the openness he didn’t want to practice. And then Potter nodded, and said simply, “I think I understand. You don’t have to answer my questions, Draco. When I asked if you’d gone out with anyone since you divorced Astoria, it was a rhetorical question.”  
  
Draco flinched, and blurted it out before he could stop himself. “How can you talk to me like that? How can you answer all my questions and not ask for anything in return?”  
  
Potter blinked at him, and looked for a minute as though he didn’t know how to answer. Then he said, “Because I want to. Because talking to you like this makes me happy.” He ducked his head and peered up at Draco from under fluttering eyelashes. “You wouldn’t want me to make myself unhappy, would you?”  
  
Draco felt a violent ripple in his stomach at the thought. He shook his head, and unlocked his teeth. “I don’t know—I don’t know how long it could be until I’m comfortable talking to you, or comfortable with you telling your friends.”  
  
Potter reached across the table and touched the back of his hand again, one finger scraping up and down in a way that made Draco have to pull away, because it was driving him mad. Potter only smiled at him. “I know. But I think someday, you will be. And I’m willing to wait until you say that you’re comfortable.”  
  
Draco wanted to say something, but his tongue tangled around his teeth, and the words escaped him after all. He had to turn his head away, and Potter, after a few more touches to the back of his hand, changed the subject.  
  
“You don’t think Highfeather will be so offended with my refusal of her proposal that she’ll go out and gossip against us, do you? It was impossible for me to accept, but I don’t know how graceful the actual non-acceptance was.”  
  
Draco nodded and forced his lungs into motion again. “I don’t think so. She had to know it was a gamble, and if she told anyone else about it, she would have to reveal that she took that gamble and lost. Most pure-bloods don’t like the losers who take risks any more than they do someone who refuses them something they want.” He looked at Potter and forced some of the words loose, if not the ones that he knew Potter would most have liked to hear. “But you realize that it won’t keep someone else from asking.”  
  
“And I’ll refuse in the same way.” Potter seemed to not want to turn a hair this morning, which Draco found as provoking as anything else he could have done.   
  
“At some point, that will cause comment, and you’ll have to say why,” Draco pointed out.  
  
Potter shrugged. “I’ve been without a wife or a lover of any kind for years. It’s not strange to keep to that for a while. If anything, that would make them all the more determined to win me, I think, and see each other as competitors. If they battle each other instead of fighting us, that’s good.”  
  
Draco narrowed his eyes. “So you aren’t bad at politics after all. Why did you always say you were?”  
  
Potter snorted. “It was less saying than _being._ I can handle politics like this when someone else has trained me in them—and you have, and Hermione has.” Sharing the credit with Granger kept his face from stinging too much with the blush, Draco had to admit, however irritating it was in other ways. “When I was in the Aurors, the kinds of things I was expected to do had little to do with my job, sometimes. When they did, I usually excelled.”  
  
“You could become better than you are.”  
  
Potter shrugged. “I have experts around me already, and no reason why I should. Besides, that would probably ruin the image of the bumbling, good-natured lout that a lot of people have of me. They think I’m someone they can trick. They don’t have to know otherwise right away.”  
  
Draco said nothing. Potter was right, and if that fact lashed Draco, well, lots of things were doing so at the moment. If anything, he should be looking forward to the moment that those feelings dissolved and move on to other subjects.  
  
There was one thing he had to ask, however, no matter how difficult it was. He sat there and struggled, and Potter sat there and watched him, now and then eating a bite of the food that Kreacher had provided.  
  
“I don’t want to pretend when there’s no one else here,” Draco said at last. “I don’t want to only brew the potion for your knee and talk about Highfeather and our other enemies and the people who might disapprove of our—” There was no right word to talk about _it_ , either. “Us,” Draco finished. “I want to snog you some more.”  
  
He was asking for other things, too, but Potter seemed to know that, if the soft, steady light that shone in his eyes as he looked at Draco was any indication.  
  
“Whatever you want,” Potter whispered, and stretched out a hand.  
  
Draco touched it, in return, clasped it and drew it to his lips, and that was, if nothing else this day had been, an overwhelming relief. And Potter kept watching him that way, face bright with the promise of more joys to come.  
  
It had been a long time since Draco had felt this kind of quiet delight, this eagerness to wake tomorrow. It was uncomfortable.   
  
_But less uncomfortable than mistaking it for indigestion would have been. At least, this way, I won’t waste potions._


	27. Keeping the Secret

  
“I don’t think you have your mind on what I’m telling you, Harry.”  
  
Harry started and glanced up guiltily at Hermione. No, he really didn’t, but he didn’t have a good excuse for the glare she was giving him. In the end, he just shook his head and muttered, “Sorry, Hermione. But I know that you want to arrange a meeting at the Ministry, and that you think you’re close to doing it, and you’re less worried than you were about danger to us from being there.”  
  
Hermione sighed and sat down, letting her fingers play, for a moment, with the edge of the tablecloth in Harry’s kitchen. “That’s a good summary. Just without the pesky details.”  
  
Harry smiled quickly at her and found something he knew would distract her. “Have you talked to Hugo?”  
  
Hermione shook her head. “He’s stayed at Hogwarts. But that ends in a few weeks, and then he’ll be home with us. I know that we haven’t got as many owls from him this week, and Ron talked about going to Hogwarts and asking him if he was all right. But then I told him about the conversation you planned to have.”  
  
Harry found himself holding his breath. He let it out with the urge to roll his eyes at his own melodramatics. “And Ron’s okay with what happened?”  
  
“He would already have come after you if he wasn’t,” Hermione pointed out, which forced Harry to nod. “Yes, he’s felt for a long time that someone had to reach Hugo, but he wanted to do it without hurting Hugo. And—maybe it couldn’t be done that way. I don’t know.” She pressed her hand against her face, and then passed it over. “Well. That’s in the past, now. I want you to be prepared for the _future,_ which means going to the Ministry and defending this research in front of the biggest crowd we’ve ever had.”  
  
Harry nodded and sat up, determined to listen this time, and not to think about Draco, still asleep in the bedroom he’d adopted newly as his own, just down the corridor from Harry’s.  
  
*  
  
“You’re one of my relatives.”  
  
Draco woke with a start, shaking his head back and forth. He grimaced when he glanced at the golden clock on the wall and saw how late it was. He knew Potter had _wanted_ him to sleep in this morning, even excusing him from the otherwise obligatory meeting with Granger, but it still disoriented him and made him feel as though he should be up and moving about.  
  
He finally followed the words to the portrait on the wall, hanging not far from the foot of his bed, and studying him with interest. The man it portrayed was unfamiliar except in the basic essentials, which meant Draco knew he was a Black. No one with those narrow eyes and that pointed face structure—which he had inherited from his mother, not his father, no matter how many times Lucius implied otherwise—could be anything else.  
  
“Yes,” Draco said, stretching and trying to ignore the creepy feeling that this man had watched him as he slept. That was what portraits did, and Draco could have banished the empty frames from the wall if he had wanted to. He was becoming gradually used to the feeling that he could do almost anything in Potter’s house he wanted to, and Potter wouldn’t object. “My name is Draco Malfoy. My mother—”  
  
“Of _course_ I know your mother,” the man interrupted. Draco was glad that the infusion of Malfoy blood had made _him_ less crass. “Of course. My name is Phineas Nigellus Black, and I knew Narcissa when she was young.”  
  
Draco nodded, wishing now that he had thought to ask his mother more about her childhood. She could have told him who Phineas Nigellus was, and he would feel less wrong-footed now.  
  
But, in truth, there were many other things he might have wished his parents to have said and done for him that would have more relevance. That was simply the sort of wish that his mind always sprang to, because he hated feeling awkward for even a moment at a time. “Then you know why I’m here.”  
  
“Blacks are taking the house back at last?” Phineas’s mouth curved up, and his eyes had a glint that Draco didn’t like. “ _Good_. Much as I am prone to admire young Harry, he does not have our blood.”  
  
Draco stared at the man until he made a quick step sideways towards the frame of the portrait—a good enough sign of discomfort for Draco. “No,” Draco said quietly. “I’m brewing potions to help Potter’s knee.”  
  
Phineas studied him with a wise glint to his eyes that Draco still didn’t like, and then gave a small shrug and leaned back. “If you children _will_ make the world foolish with your quarreling, then who am I to stop you?” he murmured. “Go on and leave your house directly in the hands of those who once persecuted you and to whom you lost the war, if you want to.”  
  
Draco could feel the sting as that shot went home, as his cheeks tingled and his hands nearly tore the blankets. And he could feel the way that Phineas watched him, as though expecting him to storm out of the room and find Potter and declare he was leaving immediately.  
  
But that was what his father might have done, or his mother. Or maybe his son, although the way that Draco understood Scorpius now, he was more likely to turn the insult aside with a joke and then never forgive the person who had insulted him.  
  
Draco, though, was a magical researcher, and he had to act like a researcher now, confronted with something he didn’t understand. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Was Potter behind the persecution of pure-bloods? I never heard that.”  
  
Phineas stared at him. Draco couldn’t identify all the thoughts at play behind those narrow eyes, but he knew some of them, and he felt his smile begin to spill out of him.  
  
“I didn’t mean that,” Phineas said at last. “No, I never meant that, never said that.”  
  
“You implied it,” Draco said, leaning forwards. “Implied that this house was in the hands of enemies and I should fight to get it back. It’s true that Potter won the war, but by that time, I wasn’t willingly on the Dark Lord’s side anymore. I don’t consider Potter an enemy for that. If he did something to insult my family and drive us out of the house, though, then that might be a reason to do so.”  
  
Phineas did some more staring. Draco looked back with a bland smile that he hoped revealed nothing of what was behind his own eyes. _You thought I was the sort of hot-blooded young man that my son is, maybe? You thought I would believe you and storm down and order Potter out of here._  
  
“He is a half-blood,” Phineas said at last. “I had the impression that you cared about that.”  
  
“At one time, more than I do now,” Draco said. “And I don’t think that you can care as much for blood purity as you’re pretending, or Potter would have ensured that your portrait frame was moved out of the house.”  
  
Phineas gave a weak snort. “You know nothing about the ways that portraits can find to stay and spy.”  
  
“I don’t,” Draco agreed. “I hope it’ll be a long time before I die, and the ways of magical portraits were never a study that interested me. But you ought to know that knowing when someone is manipulating me _is_ familiar, and of great interest. I think it’s a weak way to try and drive a wedge between me and Potter, but if you want to try it again, you can. Only I’m going to tell Potter.” He rose to his feet.  
  
“Tattling, then?” Phineas looked as if he wanted to run out of the portrait, but he did stay where he was, scowling at Draco. “You can’t bear the fact that someone might be telling you the truth about your precious Potter?”  
  
“It’s the truth I used to believe,” Draco said. “That his blood was the only thing that mattered. That was before we worked together as research partners, and he made it clear that he cared about the pure-bloods as much as he does the half-bloods and Muggleborns.”   
  
Phineas flinched back from him, his head looking for a moment as though it would slam into the side of the frame. “You’re mad, if you think that.”  
  
“I don’t think so,” Draco said. “And while you think you know him, and you’re angry at him, you can’t have spied on many of the conversations we had. You also implied that you admire Potter at the beginning of this conversation, and then you urged me to evict him from the house that’s been his home for years. Your inconsistencies are too much for me. Maybe you’ve gone mad from old age. Or maybe it’s a test, of some kind, and in that case, I think I pass.”  
  
He turned and left the room. Phineas said nothing, and when Draco glanced over his shoulder from the corridor, the old man was gone.  
  
Draco shook his head. He was going to go back in tonight and make sure the frame was turned to the wall. He had no time for one of his ancestors who would try to pick apart the alliance between him and Potter in the name of “family friendliness.”  
  
*  
  
“There you are, then.”  
  
Hermione said that in a diamond-edged, sparkling voice the minute Draco came down the stairs. Harry coughed, to remind her that he was still in the room and would appreciate her not picking at Draco more than necessary.  
  
Hermione turned her head and gave him a smile as sharp as her voice. Harry leaned back in his chair and forced himself towards resignation. Hermione was the one who would probably try to taunt Draco, or go too far with him, and find out too late that he had a greater fund of confidence now.  
  
At least, Harry hoped he did, with their feelings out between them and acknowledged at last. He would hate it if it _diminished_ Draco’s confidence.  
  
Draco took a seat at the table and sipped at the tea that Kreacher had left, then reached for the honeyed scones, his unchanging favorites. Hermione coughed. Draco looked up at her and nodded to indicate she should continue, while he broke off a bit of scone and lifted it, dripping, to his mouth.  
  
Harry found his own mouth watering, even though he had finished breakfast an hour ago. He didn’t know how, but food seemed to become more appealing when Draco ate it.  
  
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Hermione asked.  
  
“Eating,” Draco said, and broke off another crumb of scone, his eyes on Hermione and his smile bright and hard-edged enough to match hers.  
  
Hermione visibly checked the retort she wanted to make, and only shook her head. “I mean in the next meeting that we’ve planned, the one for the Ministry. This is the most important one so far, and everything has to be perfect.”  
  
“I’m sure that you can plan that better than either Potter or I can,” Draco said, and took another sip of tea.  
  
Hermione muttered as if counting her heartbeats until the wild pulse in her temple calmed down, and then leaned in and murmured, “Given that we’ve been allies for weeks now, you could at least call him Harry.”  
  
Draco glanced over Hermione’s shoulder. “What do you think about that, Potter? Do you want me to call you by your first name?” His face was the same polished mask that Harry had seen during the meeting at Hogwarts, when he had dealt with questions from the pure-bloods in the crowd that way.  
  
“Only if you wish to,” Harry said, and tried to meet Draco’s eyes in a casual way that would fool Hermione, and yet also in a way that would reveal all the deep undercurrents that ran between them and remind Draco that this was his choice to make.  
  
Draco bowed his head and offered him a small smile, then went back to eating. Hermione sighed deeply enough to be a mermaid surfacing from the water, and then turned back to Harry. “I think the Ministry will swing their might behind us if we can just handle this right,” she said earnestly. “I know that lots of people in my Department already want to. It’s a matter of finding the right words and statistics to appeal to them.”  
  
Harry smiled at her. To his mind, Draco had been the shining star of the meeting at Hogwarts, and he knew that a lot of people had only come to the one outside Grimmauld Place because they were curious to see Harry Potter the Recluse appear. It was Hermione’s turn. “You’re going to organize it wonderfully,” he said. “And I know that you’ll find the right ones to make an impact on them.”  
  
Hermione pulled back and narrowed her eyes. “And in the meantime, you sound _utterly_ unconcerned about it.”  
  
If Harry had been able to be honest with her, he would have admitted that his head was sometimes still floating from Draco’s kisses. As it was, he shook his head and reached out to press her hand. “Not that. But I know that I haven’t kept up with the Ministry’s politics in the past few years, and I wouldn’t know all the mistakes to avoid making. You tell me about them, and I’ll write letters to and firecall the right people. But I can’t be an equal partner in this, because I don’t know everything.”  
  
“I will firecall the pure-bloods,” Draco said, looking up from his empty plate. Harry felt a violent satisfaction in the middle of his belly, to know that Draco ate so well here, and was content enough to take pleasure in the meals. “They should have equal invitations to the meeting, and not many of them work in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.”  
  
“I never intended to keep them out,” Hermione said shortly, her head still bowed over the papers in front of her, but her shoulders tensing and rippling like wings.  
  
Harry quelled Draco’s immediate response with a little flicker of his eyebrows. Draco stared back and shook his head, then told Hermione, “I didn’t say you did. I did mean that you might want someone pure-blood to speak to them, and I’m the best candidate for the job and the only one you might be able to trust.”  
  
“I don’t know how much I trust you and how much I don’t, Malfoy.” Hermione’s voice was so soft Harry found it hard to hear. “You’re acting as strangely today as Harry is. Why are you still here?”  
  
“Because I invited him,” Harry said, before Draco could feel that he had to defend himself from Hermione. That was the truth, and it was a comfortable out from the questions that Hermione might otherwise press home, thus upsetting Draco. “And I want him near me.”  
  
Hermione spent a long time looking back and forth between them. If she had thought that her eyes alone could make them confess, though, she was wrong. Harry did nothing but blink at her innocently, and finally ask her if she was all right or if her eyes hurt. That made Hermione turn back to planning.  
  
Harry smiled at Draco across the table in a moment when she wasn’t looking. Of course he looked forward to the time he could tell his best friends and weather, if necessary, their disapproval so that they would see he was happy, but in the meantime, it was sort of exciting to have this kind of secret.  
  
*  
  
Draco leaned back and shut his eyes, and pretended not to hear Granger when she asked him a question. As Draco had hoped she would, she gave up and spoke to Potter instead. That gave Draco a few more seconds to recover his breath and to decide that he had made it past the first stage of the Granger Inquisition and he wasn’t about to die.  
  
 _Because I invited him._  
  
Just like Potter, to sound gracious and open while concealing a multitude of sins, Draco thought. That was a side of him that Professor Snape would have been familiar with.  
  
But Professor Snape wasn’t here right now, and Draco didn’t want to think about his death, with all its attendant, familiar frustrations and sorrows. He opened his eyes at last, and answered Granger like a calm and reasonable human being. If she didn’t always choose to behave that way to him, well, he understood and could overlook it from the same position of graciousness that Potter had adopted.  
  
And Potter went on watching him, _not_ from that emotional distance but with burning eyes, and sneaked him smiles whenever Granger was looking at her papers. Draco thought it more likely that Granger saw those smiles than not, but she didn’t interrogate them, and that was the same thing as not seeing them.  
  
For the moment.  
  
Draco was startled to realize that a determination was waking in him to _make_ her see them, and not far in the future, either. Perhaps it was his conversation with Phineas Nigellus that morning, the way the portrait had presumed so easily that Draco would be more loyal to his ancestral blood than he was to Potter. Perhaps it was the way that Granger distrusted Draco and suspected him of keeping a secret more than she did Potter, although this secret was Potter’s equally.  
  
Either way, he was determined to make her see that he was Potter’s equal, and could be with him if he _pleased._ Either way, he wanted to make all of them see.  
  
 _Perhaps someday soon, I can._


	28. Fathers and Uncles

  
Draco stepped back from turning the portrait to the wall and eyed the back of it. As far as he could tell, it was ordinary wood, or plaster, or whatever was usually used for portrait frames; the house-elves polished the ones in the Manor, and he didn’t know what they were. There shouldn’t be a magical way for his ancestor to break through it.  
  
A rustle made him look up, hoping it was Potter at his doorway. Draco had left him downstairs visiting with two of his nieces, but he should go to bed soon, and it wasn’t beyond possibility that he would stop and talk to Draco when he did.  
  
But it was an owl, a tawny owl with black edges to its wings that Draco recognized. He stretched out an arm, and the owl landed delicately and extended the letter it held to him, then leaned back and looked around the room as though it assumed he was hiding the owl treats in a secret door in the wall.  
  
Draco stared at Scorpius’s jagged writing on the envelope, and Summoned a scone from the kitchen for the owl. Kreacher had made them for the Weasley nieces, but they would have to understand that Draco needed it more urgently.  
  
The owl hooted in what sounded like disappointment, but flew over to the ancient perch in the corner and began to snack. Draco sat down on the bed and remained clutching the letter for a few minutes before he hissed out and opened it.  
  
There was only a single thin sheet of paper inside. Draco wondered as he turned it over if it was another insult, or another putdown. Really, Scorpius couldn’t have anything worthwhile to say if he wrote so short.  
  
On the paper was a single line, but it was the kind to make Draco’s heartbeat pick up again.  
  
 _We need to talk. No running this time._  
  
Draco nodded to a son who couldn’t see him, and reached blindly for ink and parchment on the table beside the bed. That was _right_. He had finally come to the point where the thought of running, of hiding what he had once been too embarrassed to have anyone notice, like his affair with Potter, disgusted him.  
  
He had hidden from the truth when he was a boy; he had hidden in the Manor after the war; he had hidden in his father’s shadow as a husband and a parent. Now it was time for both of them to come together, he and Scorpius, and Draco to learn who he really was.  
  
*  
  
Harry laughed as Lucy tried again to braid Molly’s hair. Her younger sister squirmed in front of her, pushing the red strands out of her face when Lucy tried to let them hang there for a bit. “I don’t _want_ a fringe,” she kept whining. Then she glanced up at Harry and made a face. “Sorry, Uncle Harry.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “You don’t have to apologize to me, but I think your sister might take it as an affront when she has a really magnificent one.”  
  
Lucy snorted and tossed her hair back. Hers was the true Weasley flame-red, and made her look so much like a younger Ginny that Harry had to bite his tongue when he was around her, to keep from making jokes that only Ginny had the proper context to understand. “I didn’t plan to have one. That was just what happened when I cut my hair.”  
  
“And you want me to let you near mine?” Molly ducked and flinched and then sprang up, turning around with her head shaking and her hair flaring behind her like the tail of a comet. “ _No,_ thank you. I never would have let you start this if I knew—”  
  
“I’m the older and wiser one, and I know better than you—”  
  
Harry settled back and listened to them argue. He was lucky, he thought sometimes, that his own children had never had this amount of rows. But then, when they _did_ explode, it tended to be bigger and more serious.  
  
 _Like the way that Al has decided he should just ignore the danger that house-elves and pure-blood fertility are in to follow Scorpius._  
  
Harry sighed. No, that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t paid all that much attention to what Al thought about the subject, simply because he had counted on his children to support him without question. Hell, he had thought the same would happen with Scorpius. Scorpius didn’t share his father’s prejudices.  
  
 _Now I wonder how much of that was because of what he really thought and felt and how much was what he wanted to think and feel to spite Draco._  
  
Before Harry could wander off into brooding or Lucy and Molly could come to blows, the fire turned dark red. Harry turned his head towards it, curiously, wondering what was going on. Usually, the fire only turned that color when—  
  
“Uncle Harry.”  
  
When it was coming from someone that the house’s owner had yelled at recently, Harry completed in his head. There were wards on Grimmauld Place that he would never understand, and while some had rejected him because he wasn’t a blood descendant of the Blacks, others accepted him and made him part of the house in ways he hadn’t anticipated.  
  
Now Hugo’s face was in the fire, and the Floo connection would have closed if not for Harry’s will keeping it open. He leaned forwards, aware that Lucy and Molly had fallen comprehensively silent behind him. They hadn’t heard his conversation with Hugo, of course, but gossip had a way of spreading around the entire family of cousins. Never easily traced back to the source, but Harry realized how foolish it was to expect someone to confess that.  
  
“Yes, Hugo?” Harry asked gently. He realized he had held his breath after he spoke and forced his lungs to start moving again.  
  
Hugo let his eyes fall so he seemed to be staring intently at the hearth, and he mumbled, “Is—can I come in?”  
  
Harry turned around and looked at Lucy and Molly. Lucy blinked at him and said, “You’re letting _us_ decide?”  
  
“No, actually,” Harry said, and stretched his leg further out in front of him on the small stool that he kept there for that purpose. “I’m asking you to bugger off. Gently, so that you don’t get upset with me.”  
  
Lucy laughed and stood up to kiss his cheek. “Daddy would hate the fact that I know that word,” she said reflectively, and then tugged her sister after her. Harry watched them go, and wondered if he should tell Lucy to bugger off someday in front of Percy, just to watch the expression on his face.  
  
Then he told himself to stop putting things off, and turned back to Hugo.   
  
“All right,” he said. “Come over.”  
  
Hugo stepped through the fire. He was moving as though his back hurt him, which made Harry tense for a moment, and then relax and shake his head. He was ready to see mockery where there really was none, he thought. Hugo was acting like a kicked puppy because that was what he felt like, and he didn’t know if Harry might order him out of his house any second.  
  
Hugo huddled down into the nearest chair, and sat there, biting his lip. Harry left him to take his own time. He didn’t know yet how Hugo would respond, if it was too soon for him to have considered his responses in the way that Harry had hoped he would or not, and it meant that he’d prefer not to make the first move.  
  
Hugo finally took a deep breath and looked up. “Mum let me borrow her Pensieve,” he said. “To look at my memories of—what I called you. What I said. I didn’t think I said all those things, but I did.”  
  
Harry nodded. He could taste something crumbly and fragile at the back of his mouth, like the chocolate that Kreacher tended to put on biscuits. He thought it was hope. He hadn’t felt it around Hugo in a long, long time.  
  
“It’s different hearing them like that, all at once, instead of spread out over years.” Hugo raked his fingers through his hair and kept his head bowed. “I didn’t know how much I’d hurt you. And hurt myself.”  
  
Harry nodded again. “That was part of it,” he whispered, when he could speak. “I knew that you were hurting yourself, too, by dwelling on the way that I’d got injured like that, but I didn’t think that it was right for me to emphasize that when I was yelling at you.”  
  
“Is that the reason no one ever yelled at me _before_ now?” Hugo twisted restlessly in his seat, as though he wanted to get up and run, but didn’t actually do it. “Because I was being a little shit.”  
  
Harry nodded again. “We didn’t want to hurt you,” he said. “We thought you’d been hurt enough. And the longer it went on, the more of an effort it would take to reach you. I didn’t have the heart for the kind of conversation—I mean, the kind of yelling I did at you, for a long time.”  
  
Hugo sat up, his face turning red. Draco would have said that he finally looked like a real Weasley, Harry thought, and managed not to laugh, because he shouldn’t think about making fun of Hugo’s family at a time like this. “You _should_ have done something earlier,” he insisted. “You had no right to let me go around insulting you like that for so long. You were—you were still a hero, and you were learning how to live with being hurt. How would you have felt if I was insulting Mum like that?”  
  
“Your mother wouldn’t have put up with it, no,” Harry said quietly. “But that was the way I chose to deal with it, Hugo. And since I was learning to live with pain—this was one more example of it.”  
  
Hugo shook his head fast enough to make his face blur in front of Harry’s eyes. “You can’t do that ever again,” he said. “It’s not—it’s not fair. You _can’t_.”  
  
Harry bit his lip. Hugo was still Hugo, proud and impatient and thinking he knew best. At least that was a comfort on the question of whether he had actually changed his mind or not. If he had come crawling in, all penitent and blaming himself for everything, then Harry would have thought he wasn’t sincere.   
  
“I’ll try not to,” he said gravely. “But I hope that you’ll never need to be talked to like that again, either. I didn’t enjoy doing it.”  
  
Hugo sniffed. “I saw your face. Yes, you did.”  
  
Harry shook his head. “It was like peeling off a scab. You feel relief when it’s done, but it hurts while you’re doing it.”  
  
Hugo looked away. “And are you still hurting now?” he whispered. “Is that something else I should have to pay for?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “Do you think you should?”  
  
Hugo shivered, and Harry studied him. Still suffering, still half-convinced he’d been right, still stunned by the revelation that he wasn’t, clinging to the remnants of his pride. Not enjoying this.   
  
Longing to have it over, forgiven, done.  
  
“Yes,” Hugo said. “Because I just realized there was something I never did, even when I came in and made Lucy and Molly leave just now.” Harry opened his mouth to say that they’d chosen to leave and Hugo shouldn’t attribute so much power to his own actions, but Hugo looked at him again, and his expression shut Harry up. “I’m sorry.”  
  
And with that, Harry could finally feel the pain lightening and blowing out of his chest like mist rising from a valley, and he could finally open his arms, and Hugo could come into them with a sound of pain and healing, and hug him for the first time in two years.  
  
*  
  
Draco waited for Scorpius in a room that so far was neutral to him in Grimmauld Place, an abandoned bedroom that last looked as though it had been used some time in the early nineteenth century. The thickness of the furniture and the way that things were ugly but well-made contributed to that. Draco had rejected the thought of meeting in any drawing room, or his lab, or his bedroom. Any of those might put Scorpius on his guard.  
  
Draco didn’t want his son on his guard. He wanted him thinking about how they were going to be together and reconcile.  
  
 _You sound soppy._  
  
It had been one of the worst terms of condemnation in his father’s repertoire. The only thing worse was “Mudblood,” and Draco knew that Lucius thought Muggles and Mudbloods were inevitably soppy. They were the sort who would forgive their children over and over again for not upholding standards, not caring that it denigrated the stock of their families each time.  
  
 _I’ve passed beyond that,_ Draco thought, in response to the voice. _I can choose my own reactions, and do whatever I want with the son that_ I _raised. You are a ghost in my mind, Father, one that I paid too much heed to._  
  
There were other reasons to fear that he might not have raised Scorpius the right way—Astoria, his pride, how he’d reacted to Scorpius’s Sorting—but he set them aside for now, and he was quiet inside and out when Scorpius paused in the doorway and stared at him.  
  
“Come in,” said Draco.  
  
He wondered about his tone of voice, whether it was threatening or not, but Scorpius seemed to have decided that he wasn’t afraid, thank Merlin. He walked in with his spine as straight as a cat’s, though. Draco could almost see the proudly fluffed tail that he carried behind him, and the way that his hands writhed at his sides before he fisted them shut. He took the chair beside the one Draco had indicated rather than that one.  
  
And he waited. Draco did the same thing, and then realized what they were doing and shook his head. He was not going to lose this chance to pride, either Scorpius’s pride or his.  
  
“What did you want to talk about most?” he asked. “I know that we can’t solve every problem I caused, every injustice I did to you, in one conversation.”  
  
Scorpius’s forehead wrinkled as he stared at Draco. It occurred to Draco that he looked a lot like portraits of his great-grandfather Abraxas when he did that, Lucius’s father. That relaxed Draco a little. Scorpius was still part of the family, no matter how far away he wandered, no matter how distant he seemed. And so was Draco.  
  
“You sound reasonable,” Scorpius said. “Among other things, that you’re willing to admit you didn’t treat me perfectly. I’ve never heard that before.”  
  
Draco examined the response in his head and discarded it. He would only alienate Scorpius if he said something like that. “I know,” he said. “From the time that you were born, I did everything I could to hold you at a distance, because I thought that was the right thing to do. Your mother did love you, at least.”  
  
Scorpius rubbed the back of his neck. “She was still upset when I Sorted Gryffindor, though,” he said abruptly. “Why? Why did it matter so much, as long as I still acted the way you wanted at home?”  
  
 _How often was that?_ Again Draco held back. He was the older one in this conversation, the one who was supposed to act as a role model for Scorpius, not the other way around. He hadn’t always done that job. “Because we thought we would understand you if you became a Slytherin, and not if you didn’t,” he said simply. “I suspect we knew even there how different you were, and wanted to reassure ourselves we were making it up.”  
  
Scorpius bit his lip. “Oh,” he said quietly, and then jerked his head up and focused on Draco. “Do you _really_ care about Mr. Potter?”  
  
Among the people Draco had thought of confessing his affair with Potter to was not his teenage son. But although he felt his face flame, he didn’t look away, and that alone seemed enough to make Scorpius do so.  
  
“Yes,” Draco said at last. He didn’t feel up to explaining the intimate details, and there was a high chance that Scorpius wouldn’t believe him if he did. But he could say something that he thought Scorpius could at least respect. “I—put in much time and work brewing a potion that would let him walk without pain. Even if he proved politically incompetent, I would not be able to turn my back on an investment like that.”  
  
Scorpius leaned back. “You sound cold when you call it an investment.”  
  
“If I used warmer terms, would you believe it?” Draco didn’t blink, didn’t look down, and controlled his blush with a few deep breaths. “I care for him, yes. I am curious. I am interested. I am too deeply involved with him to back away.” Those seemed the right words to use. Not even for Scorpius, not for Potter, could he use deeper words yet.  
  
Scorpius grinned suddenly. “No, I wouldn’t believe you yet if you said you were mad about him,” he said. “And neither would Al.” He sat up, stood up, and crossed the room in a few quick bounds. Draco stared up at him, and Scorpius stared down.  
  
It was the sort of standoff Lucius would never have tolerated, but Draco thought he would, for his son’s sake.  
  
Scorpius hesitated, then held out his hand. Draco took it. Scorpius pumped his up and down a few times, then said, “Thanks, Dad,” and left, maybe before his own pride could completely crumble.  
  
Draco leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Perhaps he should ask Potter if he had felt this way after confronting his obstreperous nephew.  
  
Drained, and empty, and quiet, and waiting.


	29. Meeting at the Ministry

  
“Harry, I need you to write these letters _today_.”  
  
Harry nodded with a little grimace as Hermione slapped the papers full of names down in front of him. He knew that he should have attended to this first, that it was important if they were going to encourage Muggleborns as well as pure-bloods to attend their meeting in the Ministry and hear about what they could do to help house-elves and other magical creatures.  
  
He had spent too much time in the last few days thinking about Draco and Hugo. But the situation with Hugo was on the way to mending, and Draco…  
  
Harry smiled. Draco was a ready and constant delight, even when he was calling Harry “Potter” and turning his head away as though it embarrassed him to flush.  
  
“You’re doing it again.”  
  
Harry started and returned to himself. Hermione stood scowling at him with her hands on her hips, and he nodded and picked up the quill in front of him. “I know. I was thinking about this, too, though. Is there someone I should write to first?” He peered at the list Hermione had given him, wondering if it was really in order by importance, which was his first impulse but might not be right.  
  
Hermione did a little more glaring, then seemed to sense she wouldn’t get a straight answer out of Harry for a while, and sighed. “Yes. The names at the top of the list are Muggleborns who’ve been giving ambiguous interviews to the papers, and trying to paint everything we’re doing as only important to pure-bloods, because they’re the only ones who have their fertility affected.”  
  
Harry snorted. “Did you tell them about the de Mains?” He had discovered the family in his research, a family made of Muggleborns marrying Muggleborns who had begun to lose their fertility after only two generations in the wizarding world, or more specifically after enslaving some house-elves and hunting centaurs for sport.  
  
Hermione gave him a dreadful smile. “Not all of them have heard that story yet, but it would be a good thing to mention and emphasize in your letters, don’t you think?”  
  
Harry shared the smile, and bent cheerfully over his work.  
  
*  
  
Draco sighed as yet another owl swooped into his lab. He had already answered letters this morning from Scorpius—tentative and snapping but still welcome—and Highfeather and a few other pure-bloods who were trying to nose in on ground they thought Highfeather possessed as exclusive territory. He wondered, as he plucked this letter from the pure white owl, how this new person would phrase their combination of politeness and offense.  
  
But the letter had handwriting he knew well. Draco narrowed his eyes and ripped the envelope open. Now he had to wonder how Astoria was going to mess things up.  
  
 _Dear Draco…_  
  
Draco blinked. That was so polite that he had to think Scorpius had talked to her and convinced her Draco wasn’t _so_ horrible. And that made a small spark of warmth burst into brightness inside him, because Scorpius had thought well enough of him to give that good impression to someone else.  
  
 _Not just someone else. His interfering mother, and my interfering ex-wife._  
  
He shook his head and began to read the letter again.  
  
 _Dear Draco,  
  
Scorpius has informed me of the way that you approached him and insisted on a reconciliation. I was not impressed at first, because to me it seemed only another demand that you were making on your son, who does not have the power to refuse you. But Scorpius has assured me that I was mistaken, and that you were very pleasant with him, and answered a question about his Sorting that he had never known the answer to before.  
  
I still question whether you should spend much time around him. I still think that he needs his own life, with his own friends, subject neither to your approval nor to mine.  
  
But I would like to speak with you further about our son, in a neutral location of your choosing. Perhaps we can counteract the poison and tension between us, as we once controlled it in the divorce, for his sake.  
  
Your sincerely,  
Astoria._  
  
Draco spent a few more moments looking at the letter carefully, and finding no letters written in invisible ink, and nothing that made him suspect Astoria had written it under coercion, as was his immediate impulse to think. Perhaps, after all, he could reconcile with his ex-wife as well as with his son.  
  
Then Draco paused, his mind full again of the revelation that had occurred when Astoria had gone to the papers with her threats and he realized what he had revealed to her wasn’t that damaging after all.  
  
 _She threatened me and still expresses doubt about how good I am for Scorpius, and_ I’m _the one who should apologize and meet with her?_  
  
Draco shook his head. There was a difference between being civil with Astoria for Scorpius’s sake, and meeting with her and listening to her berate him. The letter didn’t contain an apology for what she had done.   
  
He reached for a sheet of parchment and wrote on it swiftly, watching in pleasure as the words spilled out of him, the way he had sometimes seen it happen when his father was the one writing the letter to a person who had begged for money from him. Of course, the content of his letter was rather different from any of his father’s, but that was all right.  
  
 _Dear Astoria,  
  
I appreciate the spirit in which your letter was sent, and I hope that you and I will always manage to celebrate the child we created and have peace and the amity between us for his sake. But I’m afraid that I’m simply far too busy right now to meet with you. We start a new meeting in a few days, at the Ministry, and I need all my attention on the cause and what I can do to prepare for it. I’m part of a team, and can’t simply depart at my own pleasure.  
  
Yours sincerely,  
Draco._  
  
*  
  
Harry hesitated for a long moment before he stepped away from the Apparition point he’d chosen. It was a good distance outside the Ministry. That was the important part, he thought, leaning down and rubbing his leg.  
  
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to attend the meeting. Of course he did. And since he had spent enough time writing letters in the last few days for his hand to feel like it should be amputated, he certainly wasn’t going to hold back now and whine that he should be allowed to stay at home.  
  
But this was important for him in a way that appearing at Hogwarts hadn’t been. For all that Hogwarts was home to him, it hadn’t been the place where he worked for almost twenty years. It hadn’t been the last place he’d felt employed and important before the warlocks kidnapped him and hurt him.  
  
It hadn’t been a place he had visited once, only to see it full of pitying eyes that made him run away.  
  
Harry shook his head. Hermione had come early to make contact and make sure no one would interrupt the meeting; Draco had wanted to work and would come later. There was no one to escort him, no one to chivy him along and scold him about the pain in his leg or talk to him earnestly about his duty towards the wizarding world. He was the one who had to make this decision.   
  
He was the one who had to take the first step.  
  
 _I can’t ever go back to the past._ Most of his life during the last two years had been an attempt to come to terms with that particular fact.  
  
 _But maybe I can make them see that I’m no less to be respected now, that losing some sensation in one knee doesn’t cripple me for life._  
  
With Draco’s face in his thoughts, and Hermione’s, and Hugo’s, and Al’s, and Teddy’s, and Lily’s, Harry stepped off the Apparition point and walked, limping when he needed to, down the alley towards the Ministry.  
  
*  
  
“ _There_ you are.” Granger seized Draco’s arm the moment he stepped into the Atrium and bustled him away towards three prim chairs placed at the far end. “There are several people who wanted to meet you, and Highfeather’s been asking for you, and Renee Greengrass is claiming special privileges to sit near the front because you were her cousin-in-law…”  
  
Draco stared. He had known that Granger envisioned this as their largest meeting yet, but he could hardly take in the size and composition of the crowd—and that only had a little to do with the speed with which Granger took him through it. Ministry officials, Muggleborn parents, Hogwarts professors, apothecaries, Potions masters, Aurors, the inevitable reporters—  
  
And enemies, too. Hostile faces still turned towards him. Draco saw people who had never responded to the letters that he and his allies sent them, or responded grudgingly and too late. They focused on the way that Granger clutched his arm, and their faces congealed with satisfaction.  
  
Draco tossed back his head and reached up, taking Granger’s hand off his arm with a snapping motion that made her blink at him. “I can walk from here,” he told her. “You hardly need to drag me.”  
  
“No, I’ll save that for Harry,” Granger said, and shook her head. “Not that I think I’ll need to drag him somewhere where you are.”  
  
Draco gaped at her, then remembered their audience and slammed his mouth shut. He walked a few steps in dignified silence, at least until they were at the front of the crowd and prying ears would hear too much chatter to make out the conversation between him and this woman who knew too much.  
  
“So you know, then,” he said at last, his eyes steady and his voice more than that. His father would have been proud, he thought, of the way that he managed to infuse his tones with granite.  
  
“Not for sure until just now,” Granger said, and met Draco’s silent outrage that a Gryffindor would be able to manipulate him like that with a miniature shrug. “Sorry, but you made it pretty easy.”  
  
Draco thought of the smiles he and Potter had exchanged at the breakfast table, and decided that it was so. Well. He would just have to live with it. At least Granger finding out was better than one of her children doing so. Draco thought he could trust Granger not to gossip about them before he and Potter were ready to tell.  
  
“I’m here,” he said. “Potter will be. We’ll do what’s needful.”  
  
“Draco.”  
  
Draco had to control his immediate outraged breath when he turned around. Highfeather had no right to _call_ him that when she had tried to take Potter from him.   
  
Not that she knew that he had watched her proposal, of course. That gave him the advantage, and _that_ poured cool water on the flames of his fury. Draco bowed his head and said, “Yes, Madam Highfeather?”  
  
“Oh, you can call me Alicia,” Highfeather said, and smiled at him. “I was thinking, don’t you believe that I should sit up front with you, as your most prominent ally and the one who’s contributed the most money to the cause so far? I suspect that many of those who are hesitant at the moment to contribute their funds might do so if they see what honor it brings them.” She touched the medal hanging from her shirt.  
  
“Well, my ally Hermione Granger here is in charge of the seating arrangements,” Draco said, annoyed with the way that Highfeather kept her head turned away from Granger and her attention fixed on Draco all the time. Granger’s first name didn’t taste as strange as he had expected in his mouth, even though it was perhaps only the second time he had said it in his life. “You should ask her.”  
  
And he turned away before Highfeather and Granger could do more than gape at him.  
  
He finally saw Potter as he walked to the front to stand beside the chairs Granger had placed there, and paused. Potter was walking with a pale face and a hand poised beside him that made Draco think of his knee, and the last dose of potion he had given him, and how long it had been meant to endure.  
  
Longer than a single day, of course. He had given him the new, perfected dose just yesterday. Sometimes Draco thought living in Potter’s actual house was warping his sense of time.  
  
“Potter,” he said quietly, and Potter turned his head and saw him.  
  
Immediately, the tightness went out of his mouth and jaw, and he nodded to Draco. Draco wanted to reach out and touch him when he saw that. It wouldn’t have had to be an important touch, only a skimming of his hand down Potter’s hand or shoulder. Anyone except Granger could have misinterpreted it as him not wanting his ally to fall over in front of _another_ group of people, and Draco would have been happy.  
  
But Potter was still too far from him for Draco to indulge the impulse, and by the time that Draco had joined him, he had conquered that particular idea. He nodded to Potter and said, “You’re doing well?”  
  
“Yes,” Potter said. “Just had to remind myself that the Ministry isn’t any more full of enemies than anywhere else, now.”  
  
Draco stared at him. “Did you receive threatening letters from someone here?”  
  
Potter choked, but Draco found that he couldn’t resent the laughter. It sounded more like Potter’s weary attempt to come to terms with himself than anything else. “No,” Potter said at last. “But I received a lot of pitying glances, and words about how I could still make an _important contribution_ to Auror work even though I couldn’t go out in the field anymore.” His hand clenched at the level of his knee, without touching it.  
  
Draco snorted. “If they had cared that much, they would have investigated and discovered the spells on your knee before now.”  
  
Potter shrugged.   
  
“And they would have investigated to determine the identities of the warlocks who captured you,” Draco said. Now that he thought about it, it seemed strange that the Ministry hadn’t made that a top priority. They’d had a wounded Savior on their hands, and it had taken them at least a week to discover his whereabouts. Launching a major search seemed the best way to avoid a public relations disaster.  
  
Potter shook his head. “They did, but secretly, so as to avoid alerting anyone who may have worked with them. Nothing. They did their best, Draco, really they did, just like the Healers who investigated my knee did. I’d rather not talk about it anymore.”  
  
Draco nodded, but he did say, “Someone should do something about that.”  
  
Potter smiled at him. “Well, you solved half the problem. That’s more than anyone else was able to do.”  
  
Draco swallowed, told himself that he had to stop being caught off-guard like that when Potter said _something_ sweet, and swept his hand towards the chairs. “If your knee is hurting, the best cure is to sit down,” he said.  
  
“I would _never_ have figured that out,” Potter said, with a fatuous widening of his eyes. It made Draco flush to remember how recently he would have believed that expression. He stepped back and bowed Potter to his chair with a cold little movement.  
  
But Potter let his hand trail behind him, and his fingers squeezed Draco’s wrist. Draco turned his head and shut his eyes. Otherwise, he would just watch the contact long after Potter had let it go and gone to his seat.  
  
Another chair appeared on the far side of Granger’s as Draco sat down, and Highfeather joined them, nodding to them both. There was no more focus on Potter than on Draco, Draco was pleased to see.   
  
“What a remarkable woman your Granger is,” Highfeather said as she took her seat and flared the skirts of her robes around her. “Strangely—perceptive. And very persuasive.” Her eyes lingered on Granger’s back as Granger turned to start the meeting, and Draco saw them dart about a moment later. Looking for the pure-blood who directed Granger’s actions, no doubt.  
  
Draco shook his head. There was a time he had done similar things, but never one as stupid. Granger had fought for the rights of house-elves and Muggleborns for twenty years. No pure-blood who would want to control her in the first place would have chosen such a cause, or been content to remain in the shadows so long without acknowledgment.  
  
“Ready?” Potter whispered, leaning near him.  
  
Draco noticed the slant of his head, and followed his gaze. Potter was looking at the front row of chairs—no, the one just beyond them. The front row was mostly occupied by people who had made some sort of contribution or the ones in the Ministry that Granger had persuaded to give permission for this, Draco thought.  
  
In the second row sat Scorpius, his arms folded and his jaw thrust out and his eyes focused on Draco as if he wanted to devour him.  
  
Draco swallowed. But there remained the fact that he hadn’t felt the gaze until Potter alerted him, which meant he had been acting naturally in front of Scorpius.  
  
Which meant, in turn, that there was a chance—a _small_ chance—that Scorpius would acknowledge that Draco felt something sincere for Potter, and about this cause, and remember that not everything related back to him and Draco’s desire to impress him.  
  
He waved to his son and turned back to Potter, drinking in the sight of that dark hair and the green eyes so close to him. “I am now,” he said.  
  
And a moment later, he had a warm smile to watch, too.


	30. A Grand Finish

  
“Welcome.”  
  
Hermione spoke the word with a grave face, her hands clasped in front of her, but Harry had seen her like this before—defending Ron in front of the Wizengamot when someone had tried to accuse him of killing former Death Eaters, fighting for house-elves’ legal right not to be sold away from their families, arguing for teaching centaurs to read. Her body had this kind of radiant stillness that broke away from it and became energy, and anyone who stood close enough to her was liable to burn from it.  
  
“I know that you’re here because you’re curious, most of you,” Hermione went on, pacing back and forth now, her robes swirling around her. “You may or may not believe. You may or may not think that the problem affects you in any way.” Her gaze went straight to the Muggleborn faces in the crowd, and Harry saw more than one of them flush. “But our world is small, and we are bound together by the magic that we share with each other and with the magical creatures it is our duty to protect. A problem this severe becomes the problem of everyone else, sooner or later.”  
  
She moved into the meat of the problem, outlining the theory and then beginning to speak of the specific case of the de la Mains. Harry leaned back in his chair and beamed. They wouldn’t end this meeting with _all_ the hearts and minds in the crowds won over, but there would be more of them than there had been.  
  
He glanced at Draco and found him sitting there with his arms closed and something so like a pout on his face that Harry almost laughed.   
  
“What’s the matter?” he whispered. “Hermione is convincing them, I think. They’re going to believe us.”  
  
“She’s doing a better job than _I_ could have,” Draco hissed at him, his eyes fastened on Hermione as if she would pounce on him if he looked away. “I—hate to admit that, but it’s true.”  
  
Highfeather was ignoring them magnificently, Harry saw, her nose in the air, and watching Hermione with the same direct stare as Draco, though without the folded arms. Perhaps she’d found a new target for her attentions. Harry just hoped it wouldn’t come to a proposal, given that Hermione was very much married to Ron.  
  
“We’re allies,” Harry said, and let his hand fall on the side of Draco’s. “Her victory is all of ours.”  
  
Draco looked at him, eyes burning deep down. Then he turned his head so that his fingers interlocked with Harry’s. Harry knew that a few people from the crowd could probably see them, but Draco had to know that better than Harry, with the better political instincts that he had, and he didn’t seem to care. He watched Harry with those burning eyes instead, and the fingers tightened and tightened, as if he wanted to crush Harry’s hand rather than hold it.  
  
“Only _you_ ,” he whispered, leaning close enough that his breath touched Harry’s ear and shivered all through him, “could make me feel that way about it.”  
  
Harry swallowed, and before he could think better, or that Draco might not appreciate what he had to say, he responded, “I’m glad I’m the only one who can make you feel that way.”  
  
And if Draco’s eyes had burned before, that was nothing compared to the fire that raged in them now. Harry had to look away before he did something that would reveal their relationship to everyone in the room and probably everyone who could look at photographs in the _Daily Prophet_ tomorrow.  
  
*  
  
Draco knew that he should drop Potter’s hand. He knew that someone else would spot it soon, and he could already feel people glancing at them, although Granger’s speech was continuing, silently wondering what they thought about it and if Draco could support a Muggleborn as unconditionally as sitting up here would suggest he supported Granger.  
  
But it still took him long moments to work his fingers free, and then he had to give Potter’s hand another squeeze first.  
  
 _Harry. His name is Harry.  
  
And you should tell him so._  
  
Draco reminded himself, sternly, that Harry was sure to know his own name, and that there was a difference between telling someone how he felt and making that person reject him as far too soppy. Even though he was fairly sure that he would have to actually turn against Harry, or his friends, to make Harry reject him.  
  
He had to stop grinning, now, and face forwards, as Granger swept her arm out and Highfeather came to replace her, telling the story of how she had donated to establish a sanctuary in a low, thrilling voice. Draco relaxed. That tale might or might not convince the whole audience, but Highfeather was good at making it seem as though something was exciting even when it wasn’t. He didn’t have to worry about the audience’s attention for the next few moments.  
  
Which meant he could think about what he wanted to do, and how soon he wanted to tell everyone that he was dating—with—in love with—all the words sounded wrong—Harry Potter.  
  
 _The only two things that sound right are my name and his, together._  
  
He met his son’s eyes again. Scorpius watched him unblinking, his face locked in that neutral mask that Draco had tried so many times to get him to practice, without success. It was an expression he had inherited more from his mother than his Malfoy ancestors. Draco scowled at him, wondering why Scorpius had picked _now_ of all times to act properly reserved and unreadable.  
  
Scorpius blinked at him. Draco half-smiled and shook his head, intending to convey that Scorpius hadn’t made him truly angry.  
  
He had a lot to do, he thought, as he sat there and the future spun in front of him like a vision of the earth seen from a distance, a picture he had come across in one of Potter’s Muggle books. Create a potion that would ease Potter’s— _Harry’s_ —pain completely and forever. Help him find the warlocks who had done this to him. Encourage the future protection of house-elves and other magical creatures. Announce that he and Harry were, and that Highfeather should better stay far away from them both.  
  
Reconcile with his son. Come to an arrangement of sorts with Astoria that would allow them to be civil to each other for Scorpius’s sake, but inform her that there was no reason for them to speak with each other every time she felt like doing it, unless she was going to apologize. Perhaps move permanently into Harry’s home, and keep the Manor for the times that he needed a secure bolthole or a better lab—  
  
“Mr. Malfoy? Your turn.”  
  
Highfeather spoke as though she had called him many times, but Draco knew she hadn’t. He would have heard his name, _that_ name, from any distance, and his first name if Harry had called it. He rose to his feet with the plans for the future still glowing in his head and made his way to the podium with his feet barely touching the ground.  
  
He looked out on hostile faces, still, and hands that clutched quills, ready to write down anything he said and try to use it against him. He looked, and he smiled, and he saw a few faces contract and Scorpius sit up, staring.  
  
 _Probably never seen that expression on his old father’s face before,_ Draco thought in some glee, and then began to speak.  
  
“Thank you for honoring us with your presence today. I think that you have already heard from Madam Granger and Madam Highfeather how a small group of people, determined enough, can change the world. Imagine how _you_ could do it, if you wanted to.” He leaned forwards. “I was more prejudiced than most of you two months ago. I couldn’t imagine why I would want to have anything to do with a theory that posited pure-bloods were at fault for the way we treated magical creatures. I wanted to solve the riddle of our low fertility, but I didn’t want this to be the solution.”  
  
He wasn’t sure what was the more thrilling, the greater treasure, for him: the way that Scorpius continued to stare, or the way that Harry had sat up and was watching him with his hands locked in his lap and his face filled and flecked with adoration.  
  
“Then I realized,” Draco told the listening hush, “that it wasn’t about who was to blame. It was about _what one can do._ And a pure-blood who listens to the voice of reason and reasoned pride rather than mindless pride can do a great deal. Are we not reasonable? Are we not strong? Have we not survived, even through wars and Dark Lords that promised to use up our way of life in the supposed saving of it?”  
  
Frowns gave way to nods. One woman in the back, a woman named Ariel Gale whom Draco knew to be Highfeather’s particular rival, stood up and coughed.   
  
“Why do you say that the Dark Lords tried to destroy our way of life?” she asked, with a low, penetrating voice that Draco knew many of the others would hear. “Because they fought for our ideals? Because they hated Muggleborns?” The way she said the last word made it not much less offensive than _Mudbloods._  
  
Draco sighed, a professor’s patient sigh, in the face of a student who continued on believing the troublesome and untrue things that their parents had taught them. “Not at all, madam. Because they did not care about _us._ Our children, our future. They wanted to do nothing but to raise their own power, and conduct their own wars. How many pure-bloods died in those wars that never would have happened if not for a Dark Lord’s mad ambition? How many of us were tortured by the insane wizards Grindelwald and—Tom Riddle?” Draco still could not bring himself to shape the word _Voldemort_ with his lips, but knowledge of his Muggle name had come out after the war, and it would be more effective for Draco’s point if he used that one now. “They did not care about our survival, and if we had won the war, by some miracle, then we would have found our numbers too low to take advantage of the political dominance that they promised.”  
  
Gale sat down, slowly, eyes still fixed on him. Draco swallowed and wished that he could have a drink of water without looking weak. He turned as slowly as Gale from eye to eye, collecting them, silently challenging them.  
  
“What we have on our hands is not a war,” he said at last. “Not like the war with the Dark Lord, not like the war that many of us have convinced ourselves we are fighting against Muggleborns and Muggles. In a war, few people survive. This is, instead, a _struggle._ A challenge. And it is one we will win.”  
  
He went on, then, and spoke the prepared words about how pure-bloods could contribute to research funds and magical creature habitats and the founding of new sanctuaries and the welcoming of magical creatures into their homes as employees, without ever becoming involved with Muggleborns if they didn’t want to. That was the point. Offer them options, offer them choices, and he knew more people would make those choices.  
  
The _point_ was not to trap them and make them feel like any change they made was doomed.  
  
And all the while he spoke, Harry’s eyes burned brighter, and so did Scorpius’s.   
  
*  
  
Draco was _magnificent._  
  
He needed the right motivation, Harry thought, and as much as he wished it could, that couldn’t all come from the touches and kisses he wanted to give Draco. Something had to come from his own trust in himself, which his conflicts with his wife and son had nearly destroyed.  
  
But not here. Not now.  
  
Here, he shone.  
  
Harry could see more than one person in the audience staring. He might have writhed with the jealousy that Draco had apparently felt of Highfeather if he had been less secure. But he smiled, and wriggled in his seat, and thought, _Yes, he’s admirable. And he’s mine._  
  
Draco finally finished his speech, and bowed. There was a long moment when the temper of the crowd seemed to sway back and forth, between that admiration and the pure-bloods’ resentment of how much he had told them and how handily he had defused their arguments, and then the admiration crashed down.  
  
Draco straightened up from before the applause, his cheeks blazing and his eyes so dazed that Harry worried for a moment he would simply faint. Then he turned and walked back towards Harry, and took the chair beside him. His hand reached out and took Harry’s.  
  
There were darting eyes, and indrawn breaths.  
  
Well. Some of the people watching them would guess the truth, then. The ocean couldn’t have matched the depth of Harry’s sublime indifference. He took Draco’s hand in return and looked out over the heads of the crowd, which included a wildly bouncing Lily and Al, beside Scorpius, leaning forwards until he nearly pitched onto the ground.  
  
Harry looked his son in the eye and shook his head a little. He had nothing to scold Al for; if he hadn’t been supportive from the beginning, at least he hadn’t tried to oppose them the way Scorpius had, or spread lies the way Astoria Greengrass had. And Harry had good relationships with his children, and didn’t need to defend them or purge the poison from them the way Draco had had to.  
  
But neither would he hide his relationship from them, or pretend that he cared for Draco less deeply than he did, simply because that might please them.  
  
Al continued staring, while Harry looked back at him, green eyes to green eyes. Then he leaned back into the chair and gave Harry a shrug.  
  
Harry grinned. Hardly the most enthusiastic approval, hardly everything he could have _asked_ for, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he wouldn’t have to struggle against Al.  
  
And not against Ron, either, he thought, as Draco finally let his hand slip out of Harry’s, long past the point when he would have snatched it away if he was really trying to conceal what they were to each other. Ron wanted Harry to be happy, and he understood the reasons Harry and Ginny had divorced. He would accept it with the same lack of fuss that Hermione had, if with more teasing.  
  
Lily would laugh at first, and be happy second. His nieces and nephews would be happy for him—perhaps with the exception of Hugo.  
  
But Harry was done living his life gingerly, in the desperate hope that Hugo wouldn’t disapprove of it.  
  
Hermione coughed a little, and Harry realized that it was his turn to stand up and speak. He nodded to Draco and stood, pushing himself off the chair before he realized how small the grinding pain in his knee had really become. He blinked, then shrugged.  
  
He didn’t need the support of the chair, maybe, but it hadn’t done him any harm. Rather like what Al probably thought of him right now.  
  
He walked to the podium and spent a moment studying the audience. He didn’t know most of these people, other than as names on paper or nodding acquaintances that he kept passing in the Ministry when he still worked there. And they stared at him with frozen faces, some of them, having seen what he was getting into with Draco.  
  
Harry honestly didn’t care. If they let something like his having an affair with Draco put them off from donating, then they were probably just seeking an excuse to back away, anyway. They were here to convince those they could convince, not provide free entertainment for the people who would always hate them.  
  
“So,” he said quietly. “You have seen the lengths we can go to. At our first meeting, I had to sit down all the time. I didn’t have anyone who understood my theory or could give more than a potted sketch of it. Now I have more support, and even people who are willing to put their money and their reputation behind my theories.” He turned his head and locked eyes with Highfeather.  
  
He wondered for a moment if he would encounter a relentless stare from her, or a pointed one, considering that he had refused her marriage proposal and then she’d just seen the kind of love he was falling into with Draco. But she sat back up and smiled slightly at him. Perhaps she thought she should have seen what was right under her nose; perhaps she simply didn’t want to make a scene in front of an audience. Harry didn’t know, and frankly, he was too glad to care.   
  
“Now I can walk,” Harry said, turning around. “And the credit for the potion that eased my pain _and_ for the spreading of my theory among people who are willing to risk themselves belongs to one person.” He spread his fingers silently towards Draco.  
  
It was Al who started the applause, his mouth twitching as he did it, probably because he remembered Scorpius insisting that his father was no good, and believing it himself. But other people picked it up, including some of those Harry suspected Hermione of planting in the audience so that they would have a good cadre of supporters. Harry smiled as the applause swelled throughout the audience, and as Draco blushed.  
  
And he smiled harder when he spotted Scorpius clapping, too, and when Scorpius was the first one to rise to his feet.  
  
“Of all the things I’m proudest of,” Harry said, raising his voice a little to be heard above the noise, “it’s this, that someone who had every reason and right to hate me reconciled himself to me enough to accept my ideas, and validate them and brew for me.” He left the personal contribution Draco had made unsaid, but he gave him a little bow this time, and stood waiting.  
  
Draco bowed again from his chair as he had done once standing, his face so pink that Harry hoped he wouldn’t faint. Draco did shiver, making Harry fear for a moment that he would, and then sat upright.  
  
Harry turned away from the podium and tapped his leg above the knee. “The potion Draco’s brewed for me isn’t a permanent cure,” he said. “Neither is donating a few Galleons here and there, or convincing a few people here and there, a good cure for the centuries of treating magical creatures poorly that we have to pay back.”  
  
He smiled, and locked eyes with everyone nearby who looked at him long enough for him to do so. “But it’s a start.”  
  
He yielded the stage to Highfeather then, and walked back to the chairs. Draco stood up, his expression so overwhelmed that he looked as if he were drowning in deep waters, out of sight of land.  
  
Harry held his hands, and said and did nothing, simply looked. He didn’t know if Draco wanted to kiss him or touch him more than that in front of everyone else, and he was going to leave the moment up to him.  
  
He knew two things, though: He was in love, and he had no need to hide it.  
  
*  
  
It would have been a grand gesture, perhaps, the grandest, if Draco had been able to bring himself to kiss Harry on the lips. Then there would have been more photographs of them on the front page than there already were, and the reporters, like Skeeter, could have written about how love conquered all, even the stubborn blood prejudice that people like Draco’s parents had felt against Muggleborns.  
  
But Draco wasn’t always a grand person. It was taking a lot of courage for him to stand here, holding Harry’s hands under all that public scrutiny, and not run away.  
  
Harry, from the shine in his eyes, the unbounded admiration and devotion there, understood.  
  
Draco settled for a kiss on the cheek, and even that made more than one photograph flash catch them, made more than one person yell and scream out a question. Highfeather paused in her speaking, and Draco thought with one part of his mind that they would have to soothe her ruffled feelings later. That ruffling would have more than one cause, too.  
  
But the rest of him thought about the way that Harry’s hands had tightened, and the way that his son was still on his feet watching him, and the way that he could stand here and hold Harry and not want to think about Cleaning Charms.  
  
They were part of a mighty change. In pure-bloods, in the wizarding world, in the way that wizards treated house-elves and other magical creatures.  
  
But nothing seemed mightier to Draco than the way that Harry’s eyes lit up when he was near, or the way his hands trembled.  
  
 _I’m in love._  
  
He could not say it aloud yet, but he could think it.   
  
Nothing mightier than that.  
  
 **The End.**  
  



End file.
